(crossposted at BTD)

Bill Gates doesn't like Blu-Ray, Sony's proprietary DVD replacement technology. He presumably really doesn't like the fact that Blu-Ray seems to be edging out the MS-backed HD DVD in the war for third-party support.

None of that's surprising. But despite his distinct lack of objectivity, Gates is completely right: it doesn't really matter. Optical discs will be a niche product long before the end of the next format's lifecycle. Hard disk storage combined with mature network technology makes discs irrelevant.

It's true that there's a lot to be said for Warren Jackson's famous quote about the bandwidth of physical media — mass-produced discs will continue to hold an advantage in sheer price per gigabyte. But the average consumer is about to see their bandwidth needs level off. A speedy cablemodem coupled with a healthy BitTorrent swarm can already deliver a movie in about as much time as it takes to go to Blockbuster and back. We need faster connections and business support for online distribution of films, but those things are already within reach. After that, the next bandwidth plateau will be on-demand HDTV streaming — a technical problem that pressed discs won't help to solve.

In the very near future I suspect that we'll see devices like this one integrated with consumer routers and cablemodems. Throw a download client daemon onto its tiny brain, an interface for telling it how to start transfers, and maybe a VPN so that you can access it from anywhere. All of a sudden your files are securely stored and available from any place and at any time. You could already hack something like this together for three or four hundred dollars. I expect that within a year or two we'll see a consumer-grade network device with 100 gigs of redundant storage selling for around $250. At that point, what use do we have for discs?

Don't get me wrong: lots of money will be made off of Blu-Ray. Discs will be on the shelves of Best Buy and Blockbuster. They'll still be used for archival purposes. But they will inevitably be eclipsed as a distribution medium. The Blu-Ray/HD DVD format battle promises to be as confusing and irritating as Beta versus VHS was. But this time it's a fight that consumers can safely ignore.