olivetalks

DVD, HD DVD and Blu-Ray are now fighting for the supremacy in the living room. Which one is going to win? Let’s look at some history.

Back in 1982 the first widely spread optical media appeared in the form of a Compact Disc. That familiar by now to everybody piece of plastic could store 650 MB. Computer hard disks at that time were puny and expensive – 10 MB unit would set you back by $900!

DVD was introduced in 1997. The capacity of a single layer single sided disk (by the way, I hate the dual sided disks, don’t you?) is 4.7 GB. I remember that the PC I bought in 1997 had a 3 GB hard disk. The hard disk’s price was about $300.

First HD DVD disks were released in April 2006 with capacity of 15 GB for a single layer disk.

In June 2006 Blu-Ray disks appeared on the market. The capacity of single layer disk is 25 GB.

January 2008 – a 500 GB hard disk costs about $110.

Why am I talking about CDs and hard disks? To demonstrate some trends. You can see that from 1982 to 2006 the capacity of optical media has increased 38 times or an average increase by 16% per year. Meanwhile the capacity of hard disks has gone up 50 thousand times or an average 52 % increase each year!

When CDs first appeared each could contain 65 hard disks. Now one hard disk can hold 20 Blu-Ray disks. And each year the difference in capacity gets bigger

Look also at the solid state media. Not so long ago the biggest USB pen drives were 1GB, now you can get them in 16 GB size and if you want to spend a ridiculous amount of money even 64 MB. They’re already starting to replace hard disks especially in laptops.

So with this whole explosion of storage capacity of magnetic and solid state storage why would anybody want to stick to easily scratched pieces of plastic?

Update: 20th Feb 2008

It looks like HD-DVD has lost this war. Not necessarily the best thing for the consumers considering that it had no region coding and less DRM than Blu-Ray.