Slow death of physical media?

Video on iTunes heralds the demise of physical media.

Thanks to rampant file sharing and the solid development of digital music files, CDs purchased are now but intermediary devices between the store and your computer, and they always seem to end up lost in “that pile” somewhere behind your bed, anyway.

The same thing will begin to happen to video. Slowly.

With TiVo and video iPods, along with millions of other devices that are making it more and more possible to simply store your movies and TV shows in a handy little box attached to the TV (or simply on the little device), how much longer will we need DVDs? BluRay?

I bought a pack of CDs today (it said 25 pieces, but I bought it even though I like my CDs in one piece…zing!) and it made me think about how I planned to use them for such a weird purpose: storing data.

I remember when backing up data onto some sort of drive — tape drive? zip drive? — was regular practice. I remember using floppy disks to actually transfer files between computers. I don’t think I’ve tried using anything like a CD for data in a long time. It’s usually some other form of hard drive.

Out here, however, I’m stuck with a very limited amount of space on my laptop, and let’s do the math: 25 CDs at 800mb each, that’s---holy crap! 20 gigs?

I wonder how long it’ll be before everything is just digital. You go into a music store (if you go in at all, which I actually think you would for some time to come) with your holographic memory cube, plug it in and make a purchase.

It’s all interesting stuff. The future of media storage.