It was not very long ago that we were all excited to have 20 MB hard drives on our PC’s.

I think this topic only starts to get interesting when we start to discuss whether limits exist in the potential of hard drive or solid state storage capacity. I know very boring, but it will be very important years from now.

I also think the real challenge we have is to develop a solid state digital storage medium that will support hundreds of GB storage capacity and have an almost unlimited life. I have heard that CD’s, DVD’s have 3-5 year life spans and we all know hard drives have about the same life.

Reliable long-term storage is bad for content and hardware companies as selling reliable long-term storage would limit long-term revenue from people replacing storage disks and hard drives. But, consumers over the next few years are going to be upset as movie disks and family videos on CD’s and DVD’s will start becoming unreadable. All those consumers will start demanding more reliable storage. The good part is that with better and more reliable storage will bring an enhanced ability for content companies will sell complete archive storage devices of every commercial movie, video and audio content ever made that could be sold via DRM off of the storage medium. We will only need the ability to add more current content to these huge storage devices. The content updates could be done over wireless broadband networks, DSL and cable networks. With huge storage capacity will remove the pressure on building out last mile optic networks. I think wireless will also continue to get faster and faster.

I think we just need to look at the current Podcasting craze as a sign that people will want to store media for playback and getting the content delivered automatically is the ticket.

Podcasting is also an example that everyone will feel empowered to become broadcasters to family and to create niche video and audio programming from the home and office. Those same people will want to store it all and have reliable storage on these same huge storage devices.

The consumption of media will dramatically change again in the years to come as we will have cheap storage beyond the Gigabyte as we get into Petabyte and Exabyte storage.

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