Stardate 20010726.0840 (On Screen): It seems as if too many corporations think that there can't be a party unless they attend. Certainly the media producers feel that way, but they're wrong. This article discusses some upcoming approaches to reducing the cost of FLASH memory and alternative memories, to try to get speeds up and sizes and prices down. While not plummeting at the same rate as HD costs, FLASH memory is certainly getting cheaper with time. Looking further into the future, this article speculates about a new medium for recording and playing back video which would use memory cards instead of tapes. I think this is plausible. And then it contains this quote: "Music companies and other content providers need assurances against piracy before they'll be willing to put their intellectual property on flash-memory video and audio players." Unfortunately for them, there's no indication that a recordable medium requires substantial buy-in from publishers in order to be successful. Prerecorded video tapes only became big business
after there was a big installed base of players, which were originally purchased primarily in order to record things off broadcast TV. Equally, portable MP3 players (RAM or HD or CD) have been a notable success without any prerecorded media at all. I think that a memory-card video/audio player is likely, but it's going to happen whether the media companies are involved or not -- unless they impose draconian copy protection mechanisms on the standard before it's released, in which case they'll piss in the soup and ruin it for everyone (as happened with DAT). No recordable medium with strong protection for intellectual property will ever be a commercial success.
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