I'm sure my opinion isn't too far off most people in that I honestly don’t care what format the next movie format is, but I don’t see the future of movies in this format.
Even if blue ray were to become popular for a few years before it fades away I'd want to see my new player handle 'all' current formats before I'd spend $900 on anything. DVD/HD-DVD/VCD/CD/Blue-Ray.
But I see a different kind of change. Here's my format idea (and I hereby claim ownership of this idea should it not already be copywritten)!
Let's be honest, the DVD/VCD/CD format of media is dying. Most customers get tired of the storage space used by their movie collections and given the majority of people's use of p2p in the US and other countries, most customers want their movie's in electronic format (for many reasons).
It's time for a 'real' format shift and not a modification on the current design, wasting yet more customer money on another hardware shift that won't last more than a few years before the one I'm going to outline now.
I want to see flash cards being made with movies and music on them where I could go to my local retail store or movie rental chain, and during checkout, the movie rental would be in the form of an SD memory size card.
Security would be easy, though nothing is perfect and everything has a work-around in an analog sense. But once you get the card home, you insert it into your media player of choice (including PCs and cars) and the player connects to the Net and ask you for the auth key on the movie.
After it confirms the key, it associates the movie with your online account and you copy the movie to your local player and auth it, although you'd be limited to two authorized players.
Should I decide to sell or loan my movie to a friend, I'd just de-auth my local players and my online account would then de-associate the movie, making it available for someone else to take it over, and the circle of life continues on a much more durable media.
Should the card be damaged, I could take it to any retailer who would (for $5) replace it and link the new serial to the old one instead of transferring rights.
Also, I see this moving one step further where once you've associated the movie to your online account, you'd be able to play the movie from the Net, should you be away from your home on a trip and wish to watch it from the comfort of your laptop.
and by the time the latest format war is settled, most of us will simply download movies in our living rooms instead of hoarding them on little plastic discs."
