The media consumer in 2004 and beyond will want to have total control over how he or she use digital media and this struggle to control the portability of digital media will be the most difficult battle in recorded world history.

You think the 2004 presidential battle was brutal –you have not seen anything yet. The battle over digital media control will be the most important issue of this century. The war will be between big corporate interests and the people of whom many are the corporations. This battle may actually in the end bring big corporations down and give rise to the people. We are seeing this movement happen with open source software, independent films, independent music and then independent video.

I think the whole concept of TV will slowly vanish into on-demand and downloaded video in all forms. The distinction between TV and movies will vanish. TV and movies represented location and location is disappearing. Digital media is going to be viewable everywhere.

When you see Microsoft going public in such a big way about digital media everywhere and the evolution of the media center pc. It is hitting the mainstream and will grow fast from here on! But Microsoft’s ability to control digital media will struggle as they will not ever really win and will ultimately slow digital media’s growth. Digital rights management systems will be compromised over time by smart hacker crooks. I think digital media will be much more open in the future than we think it will be now.

Digital media in the home is only going to get better as we get better and smarter software, bandwidth and storage to manage all the coming digital media.

Microsoft’s Media Center is really on track to becoming very important for managing, recording and viewing all our personal digital viewing. Microsoft is really on track to beat out TIVO and on-demand set-top boxes. Media Center already is better than TIVO.

I am a firm believer that smart phones with wireless broadband, huge storage capacity and very fast processing power will rule. Smart phones will become the all important lifeline to all of our personal media in all forms. The coming few years are going to be very interesting as all this personal media gets portable and consumed everywhere on the network.

My bet is on the people to win more control of their digital media.

On another note — we also really need permanent and reliable long-term storage of our personal digital media that is more durable than CD’s and DVD’s as they decay. Storage hard drives fail all the time and have limited life. I know most long-term storage mediums have never been tested for actual life as most have only been in production for less then 5 years.