Posted by Goro on 12/31/05 01:43

Allan wrote:
> http://www.slate.com/id/2133291/
>
> Hollywood's New Year
> My predictions for 2006.
> By Edward Jay Epstein
> Posted Monday, Dec. 26, 2005, at 7:48 AM ET


> 1. The success of Google's Wi-Fi experiment in San Francisco.

i thot that SF already declined this offer. Google has instead focused
on their home city (Mountain View?).

as to the main pt, bandwidth is increasing rapidly! Comcast offers
6Mbps up to around 9 Mbps. Cox just upped from 4Mbps to 6Mbps and
upgrading to 9Mbps is only $15 per month. I wouldn't be surprised to
see bandwidth double in the next year.

> 3. The proliferation of digital video recorders.

Should also mention a new brand of DVR that is becoming quite popular:
the home computer/mediacenterPC/XBox Mediacenter.

HD Tuner cards are getting cheaper and with the proliferation of HD
vids on the internet...

THere's now a alt.binaries.hdtv that has stuff like 1080i SLEEPER CELLs
and 720p FINDING NEMO.

As more people sample these, they will find it more and more difficult
to watch 480p material anymore.

Of course these .ts files are pretty damb huge. It's over 10GBs for
NEMO, which might not seem big compared to 480p DVDs (9GBs), but it's
substantially bigger than 480p Xvids or even 720p Xvids and h.264s.

Hardware h.264 vid cards are out, allowing for 720p files that are
about the same size as old SD Xvids.

Quicktime HD is becoming the de facto standard for movie trailers.
They look good, too.

>
> 4. The Blu-Ray DVD.
>
.... and HD-DVD,too, right? :)


> 5. The mandated digital conversion of television.
>
> Congress passed legislation in December requiring that all television
> signals be converted from analog to digital by Feb. 17, 2009.
... OR until a large percentage (75%?) own Digital TVs.

They also passed (proposed?) a bill to spend something liek $4B (from
teh $10B made from auctioning the analog current cable bandwidth) to
BUY people digital cable converter boxes... uhmmm....


-goro-

[Back to original message]