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iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World? 230

Posted by Zonk from the one-miiiiillion-gigabtyes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A senior Google exec has been talking up the prospect of iPods that can hold all the world's media due to the plummeting price of storage and its increasing volume-to-size ratio. Google's VP of European operations, Nikesh Arora, predicts that in as little as just over a decade's time, iPods will be capable of storing 'any video ever produced.'" From the article: "Arora believes, mobile is likely to follow the same path. 'Mobile is not going to be a different thing,' he added — and if the mobile industry is to capitalize on the growth of content, it would be wise to ape the development of the internet. He said: 'The mobile industry has to go through the same phases the internet has gone through... Mobile will have the same learning curve. It would be somewhat foolish to leapfrog the stages the internet went through.'"
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iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World? More

iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World?

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  • But, I can put all the video worth watching on an iPod now and still have room left over.

    • Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:13AM (#17017630) Homepage
      Yes, but we'll be stuck watching it on those teeny tiny screens.

    • Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Furmy ( 854336 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:26AM (#17017940)
      "I think that enough space to hold all the world's video should be enough for everyone"

  • Backwards (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Trails ( 629752 )
    increasing volume-to-size ratio.

    Something in there isn't right. I think this is meant to be either

    decreasing volume-to-size ratio.

    OR

    increasing size-to-volume ratio.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lordb42 ( 1032890 )
      It is correct as long as the ratio is storage volume / physical size. It is a bad choice of terms since it could also mean physical volume / storage size.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by smitty97 ( 995791 )
      increasing volume-to-size ratio.

      the phrase is correct, theyre making them louder again.

  • Apple and the Google (Score:5, Funny)

    by spellraiser ( 764337 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:13AM (#17017644) Journal

    Apple: Gee, Google, what are we going to do tonight?

    The Google: The same thing we do every night, Apple ... Try to hold ALL THE VIDEO IN THE WORLD!

    • Re:Apple and the Google (Score:5, Funny)

      by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:38AM (#17018208)

      Somehow that mental image lends itself more to Microsoft, don't you think?

      Ballmer: Narf! Poit!

    • Re:Apple and the Google (Score:5, Informative)

      by Josh Lindenmuth ( 1029922 ) <joshlindenmuth AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @12:40PM (#17019502) Journal
      This is just as funny as the story is ridiculous.

      Historically and mathematically Google's claim just doesn't add up. Apple's iPod site claims that their 80GB video iPod can store "up to 6 1/2 hours" of video. Let's be very aggressive and assume that hard drives continue doubling in capacity every 2 years for the next decade. Here's where'd we be after 10 years:

      2006 - 80 GB, 6.5 hours
      2008 - 160 GB, 13 hours
      2010 - 320 GB, 26 hours
      2012 - 640 GB, 52 hours
      2014 - 1.28 TB, 104 hours
      2016 - 2.56 TB, 208 hours

      A 2.56 TB iPod would be quite impressive, but wouldn't even hold every season of The Simpsons, let alone "All the video in the world". Even if they ignored power/size requirements and used full 3.5 inch desktop drives, capacity would only be ~25.6TB or 2080 hours. This isn't even enough space to hold 1 year's worth of network soap operas.

      • Re:Apple and the Google (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tempestdata ( 457317 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @01:00PM (#17019912)
        Yes, but he didn't talk about compression, resolution, frame rate or even how many colors in which you'll get to see it. :P

        Seriously though, I agree with you. I think its just some guy making bold predictions to get attention. Like predicting flying cars, or colonies on the moon, plastic disposable houses, or android helpers, etc. Do what I do, and go 'yeah, maybe.. but I'll believe it when I see it.'
      • Let's be very aggressive and assume that hard drives continue doubling in capacity every 2 years for the next decade

        That's not very aggressive; that is conservative. Based on price-per-byte, we've been seeing a doubling every 14 months since 1990.

        A 2.56 TB iPod would be quite impressive, but wouldn't even hold every season of The Simpsons

        4 DVDs per season at 4.7 GB per disc. Let's assume that the show will still be on air in a decade or so and that there will be 30 seasons to store on your iPod. That's 564

      • Re:Apple and the Google (Score:5, Informative)

        by aftk2 ( 556992 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @01:31PM (#17020524) Homepage Journal
        Heh, that's 6 and a half hours of video playback, on one battery charge.

        Sheesh.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )
        You're criticising the slashdot mis-quote instead of what the guy actually said. Here it is from the article:

        Around 10 years down the line that could be expanded, creating iPods that can hold all the music ever sold commercially.

        He said: "In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced?"

        So, it seems pretty clear to me that he's discussing all (music) video, and not "all the video in the world" such as simpsons and soap operas. He still may be wrong, but but ~30,000 music videos w

  • Everyone having every video? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ryanov ( 193048 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:14AM (#17017648)
    But what a stupid idea. Why have millions of copies of everything when theoretically networks will allow there to be a few replicated copies? Seems a pointless waste of disk space to me.

    Besides, there will be many more videos ever produced by that time than there are now... I doubt technology will keep pace with the rolling-themselves-off-a-cliff-in-a-shopping-car-v ideo crowd.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by From A Far Away Land ( 930780 )
      It's not so far fetched - and think of the bandwidth savings. Bandwidth will go to new content only, and our "video past" can be mass produced. If storage of that magnitude becomes real, it will revolutionize more than just the mobile video market. Datacenters could possibly look as different as computers from the 1960s do, compared to today's PCs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sterno ( 16320 )
      Well the reality is that while your IPod might be able to hold all the video in the world you still need some insanely fat pipe to download all of the world's video from. Today I can go to the Itunes store and download a video, but it takes like 20-30 minutes to get it. Going to take an awfully long time to fill my ipod at that rate.

      Right now I have the 60GB Video IPod and I do not fill it. The limitations imposed on me are not storage capacity, but rather bandwidth and time. I'd love to put every video
      • 40 minutes, huh? That's weird. I have a nice little mplayer script that will rip movie->iPod (or any other format you'd care for) in under 20 minutes. At that resolution, the ultra-high-quality settings have little effect, so you can get by with just trellis quantization.

        • It does all the recompression in under 20 minutes as well?

          What takes a lot of time in moving a video onto an iPod isn't the ripping, but recompressing it to a format that the iPod will play. According to Apple [apple.com]:

          iPod can play the following video formats:
          * H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Low-Complexity Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
          * H.264 video, up to 768 kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Pro

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Znork ( 31774 )
      If the current mess wrt copyright goes on, local storage and local darknet mass duplication may very well become the predominant way to distribute media, as the more sensible approaches may find themselves being illegal and heavily monitored.

    • Oblig. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Tmack ( 593755 )
      Finally! A place to store all my pr0n!!!
      Seriously though, do they realize how many anime tentical rape videos are out there???

      blah

    • But what a stupid idea. Why have millions of copies of everything when theoretically networks will allow there to be a few replicated copies? Seems a pointless waste of disk space to me.

      Your idea sounds like a stupid waste of bandwidth to me. If an iPod can store every video ever, they can just image the thing at the factory to hold all videos and all songs. We are talking about a device specifically for playing videos and music, so using the hard disk for anything else would not be beneficial.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Picass0 ( 147474 )
      >> "Why have millions of copies of everything when theoretically networks will allow there to be a few replicated copies? Seems a pointless waste of disk space to me.

      Because there will come a point when storage becomes cheaper than bandwidth. And as my Computer Sience prof told us on day one "You are responsible for your own storage. Anything left on the mainframe can be deleted without warning"

      Never make the mistake of trusting that the data you prize is important to somebody else. They delete,

    • There's been a rash of scare-stories about the ephemeral nature of digital information, how it's less likely to survive 1,000s of years like a papyrus scroll sealed in a jar or inscribed clay tablets have. But most seem to also ignore the multitude of copies that now exist of most things. How many unique copies of valuable information have been lost over time despite being stored on in "permanent" media?

      I wouldn't suggest that having 10 milion copies of LonelyGirl around is better for the future than a s

  • It already can! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aarku ( 151823 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:15AM (#17017676) Journal
    ....At 2x2 pixel resolution, 1 bit color, 1 fps... Where do you draw the line on video quality?

  • Personal storage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 ) * <Satanicpuppy.gmail@com> on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:15AM (#17017694) Journal
    Personal storage is something we do now, because networking isn't cool enough. In ten years, it's entirely possible that networking will have increased to the point where the idea of keeping a local copy of ANYTHING will seem weird.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:35AM (#17018124)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • >If I have a local copy, preferably one unencumbered by DRM, I don't have to worry about someone limiting my access to it.

        Exactly. This is why I will never sign up for remotely hosted anything, pretty much.

        Too many people are trying to generate "revenue streams" by luring me with the "convenience" of paying for a "service" to access my data. They do this by making it so you don't own or control the data. Once they have enough of your data under their control, they can call all the shots, because it's

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
          Exactly. This is why I will never sign up for remotely hosted anything, pretty much.

          There is a need for backups. However, they may not be online. In fact if you want them secure they should be in your safe deposit box or something. Having them in your house doesn't save you if your house burns down, for example.

          If your backups aren't offsite, then I can't possibly take you seriously. If they are, then never mind :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Firehed ( 942385 )
      It's also possible that, in the same ten years, the telco industry gets so greedy that it costs a buck just to check your email, so remote copies of anything outside your local intranet are completely infeasible. I hope not, but don't rule it out.
    • On a smaller scale I do something similar.
      I and my brother both have a repository of our DVD collection on PC transcoded to MP4.
      We also have a VPN bridge between our LANs. Our XBMC players can see movies on either LAN and play them as if local, though there is no actual copy at any TV. It's really cool, though somewhat limited. Sometimes we can see hiccups when watching a video remotely, Vs on the local LAN segment, but for the most part there is no issue. We could up the buffering level to deal with QO
      • now the question is how much disc space is your repo? I imagine that between the two of you (based on my brother's and my collections) it could easily take a couple hundred gigs, people with really large collections could easily span thousands of gigs. Even at thousands of gigs I bet they're not even close to 1% of all the world's videos. A couple million terrabytes later and you might be spanning 50% of the world's videos. I think it is foolish for Google to think iPods will hold all of the worlds videos i
        • Based on context of the original quote in TFA, I don't think the Google exec meant all the video content in the world, but was referring only to music videos. I'm not exactly sure when the first music video was made (I'm sure Wikipedia could help me here), but I suspect that you could fit the back catalog in less than 100TiB plus a few TiB a year, with good (lossy) compression.

          I think the move to high-definition content is going to eat up a lot of this capacity increase, though. 320x240 video seems to be ac

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 )
      Um, why? Even if I had a 10Gbit uplink I'd still want plenty of local storage; it's not going to slow down or die because of network/reception problems, it's not going to disappear because my credit card expired or the company hosting it went bankrupt, and it's probably going to be faster because I'm not sharing it with lots of other people across many disparate networks. Doubly so for a portable device, unless you're expecting to see Ansibles within the next decade.

  • What then? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Billosaur ( 927319 ) * <wgrother@optonline. n e t> on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:16AM (#17017708) Journal

    Let's suppose you can in fact cram all the audio/video in the world onto an iPod? What then? How could you conceivably use all that information? There aren't enough hours in the day as it is, let alone to work your way through all that.

    Personally, I don't see how this could be useful. The rapid expansion of memory capacity coupled with the falling price has led to bloat, whereby content is trying to expand to fill up these enormous memory spaces. To what end? Isn't there some kind of inverse Moore's Law for memory?

    • Well, it wasn't that long ago when people wanted to know what you would do with a pc in your house? or why you would need 6Mbits of bandwidth at home. Now, Google and other search engines are household words, and nearly everyone knows that you can find just about any information that you want, when you want, where ever you want using the Internet. Video/Audio is simply another form of information or information storage. Imagine you are sitting in a social setting (bar for some of us) and the conversation co
      • I can just see a professor allowing a video of his lecture. If they did would they still be needed the next semester? By not allowing it they assure themselves that there will be a need for their lecture. Try getting a video of someone repairing an automobile or any electronic product. If they did maybe those who are good with tools could repair them without a lot of training. This would mean a reduction of new sales since the old ones would last more. We live in a throw away world. This includes lec

    • Let's suppose you can in fact cram all the audio/video in the world onto an iPod? What then? How could you conceivably use all that information?

      You don't, nor do I think the Google exec is seriously suggesting that you would have iPods in fact having all that media on them, even if they have the capacity, simply that with the current trends, storage capacity limits are very rapidly going to stop being a limiting factor for portable media devices for any practical purposes. His comments on the mobile industr

    • When you have too much information, it becomes data. The meaning is lost and you are no longer informed by it. To find what you want, you need a searchg engine. No doubt, Google is considering what search requirements an ipod-like device will need when these devices get too big to navigate using current methods.

      Moore's Law can be ridden both ways. The most common way is to write bloaty code and develop bloaty systems because memory & CPU keep increasing so you can get away with it. The factor that is co

  • Capacity. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by commo1 ( 709770 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:16AM (#17017712)
    What exactly is the estimated capacity for "all the world's [media]". This sounds like one heck of a bold statement when the numbers at the moment are unfathomable for holding a back catalogue of everything broadcast on network television and everything from blockbusters to B-movies from 1890 on, let alone net-generated videos, cable and alternative delivery methods.

    • Re:Capacity. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by grnbrg ( 140964 ) <slashdot.grnbrg@org> on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:55AM (#17018538)
      What exactly is the estimated capacity for "all the world's [media]".


      Interesting question... IMDB [imdb.com] currently has records on:

      • 363,000 movies released theatrically. (Average of 2 hrs)
      • 367,000 TV episodes. (Average of 30 minutes)
      • 57,000 made for TV movies. (Average of 90 minutes)
      • 51,000 direct to video movies. (Average of 2 hours)
      • 5,300 mini seris. (Average of 3.5 hours)
      Averages are wild-assed (but somewhat reasonable) guesses. Given that the MPEG2 encoding used by DVDs runs at about 25MB/minute or 1.5GB/hour this works out to about 2,000 terabytes for all current known video.


      Assuming storage capacity continues to double every 18 months ( big assumption!), and that we currently have 500G drives commercially available, we can expect to see this capacity in a single drive in less than 20 years.



      grnbrg.

      • Your guesses aren't that wild-assed. Everybody knows that hdtv still won't have caught on by then....
      • Storage has actually been doubling every 12 months lately. But yeah, who knows how long that'll last.
      • A few things you are missing:

        -Journalism
        How many accumulated news broadcasts do you think there are? Makeing some gross simplifications, assume there are 1000 stations that create 3 half hour news broadcasts every day and multiply by the number days they've been broadcasting (20 years gives more than 7000 days) and you get a total of over 10 million hours, more than the total you've listed above. Note that my estimates are conservative and the actual may be as much as a couple orders of magnitude more.

        -No
      • Add porn, and it will take another order of magnitude more storage!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
        You're ignoring a few big questions. First, how much of this current content is HD? How much of it will be available in HD by 20 years from now? That can cause a tenfold (or more) increase in file size. On top of that, how much content is going to be created between now and 20 years from now? And how much of that content is going to be HD?

        20 years from now, we'll still be looking at the state of things and saying 'One day, we'll have one storage solution that can store all of this.'

  • Media files will keep growing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) * on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:16AM (#17017716)
    I doubt that there'll ever be an iPod that can hold everything, but then again I doubt the author truly believes it. The more space we have the more we make use of it. 15 years ago a 4GB hard drive would be seen as enormous, now for many people 100GB ain't enough.

    New content is produced all the time, content is also likely to be stored at a better quality as long as space keeps increasing. I'm looking forward to the day of 80GB nanos, to me the nano is the ideal size, any smaller and it'd be awkward to control.

    • My father made an insightful comment to me at the beginning of the PC era -

      As the storage space increases, the applications will expand to use the available space. It's an arms race. You'll never have 'more than enough' storage.

      I've found those words to ring true for a quarter century now. I just purchased a 300GB drive to use as a backup for my primary 300GB desktop machine. I'm struggling to create a coherent backup strategy for several machines and about a half-a-terabyte of information. I suppos

  • 640k is enough for anybody (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:17AM (#17017732) Homepage Journal
    I'm really tempted to save that article just so I can pull it out and show how naive people were back in 2006. If there is one thing time has taught me, it's that the volume of information expands in relation to your available storage. I mean 10 years ago one of our 500GB modern hard drives could have probably stored all of the video available on the internet with room to spare.

    I do agree that an iPod like device could probably hold enough video (high quality video at that) to well exceed its battery life however (modern iPods have no trouble doing that with music).
    • Modern iPods have no problem holding enough video to exceed batter life: Battery life while playing video is a little over 6 hours on the newer iPods, and you can easily store a half-dozen movies at DVD-quality. (Or at their own max playable quality, which is slightly lower.)
    • Music and video won't expand like software. You can't really improve on CD quality...people just can't tell the difference. A 300mb/hour flac file is about as bloated as it'll get. Video's probably peaking with HD. The huge growth in flash devices shows that many people these days are more interested in battery life and portability than size already and the complete failure of better than CD quality formats like SACD shows that people just aren't interested in the quality that would require bigger files
    • Making a comment like that is confused at best... saying "all the world's video" doesn't reflect well on anyone's intelligence. Not to mention the fact that there's no way to get all of the video (unless you go into houses and digitize old home movies), and the never-ending stream of new material. To be fair, it appears that the journalist made up that quote. The exec only said that ipods could hold "any video ever produced" (not every) and that it could hold every music file digitally released. He used

  • Questionably useful? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Toby The Economist ( 811138 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:19AM (#17017752)
    Imagine a video iPod with a nice little screen (640x480) and enough store for your entire video and music collection.

    You can carry it with you anywhere.

    Useful?

    I can usefully take music with me, because I can *listen* while I physically perform other tasks - like being at the gym, sitting down at work while I code.

    But *video?*

    Video is much less useful, because to *watch* you can't be doing other things - your eyes are occupied.

    So I think it's only useful for being portable in situations where you have to sit and *wait* and cannot do other things.

    For me that means just one thing; waiting for the bus and maybe when I'm on the bus, if it doesn't make me feel ill.

    For others, I can only imagine similar situations, e.g. being stuck on a mode of transport.

    • By 2012, you won't have to worry about the video making you ill while riding on a bus or car, because screens will be fast enough to do anti image-stabilization. (my invention) Your iPod will have a G sensor in it, and will compensate for the bouncing so that your brain doesn't get the idea that the image is wonky.

      It requires a display bigger than the actual image, and little or no persistence, but it fools your eyes into thinking that the images are being displayed on a motionless screen outside the v

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by miyako ( 632510 )
      I think that if we had available our entire video collection at the tip of our fingers, we would find a lot more time to make use of it. For one thing, a lot of video doesn't require constant visual contact. Many TV shows- especially shows that you've already seen once or twice- can be enjoyed mostly through audio, with an occasional glance at the screen.
      I can see it being nice, being at work during a bit of a slow period, and queuing up an episode of TNG or Buffy.
  • In 2000 we all travel in flying car without any traffic jam, doctor will be a very knowledge computer, and we will have a pill that solve all the medical problem, and the must important, we will live in a society of leisure, eveyone will need to work only one hour by month.

    Now, I travel in my car 1 hour every morming to be closed in a stupid cube 8 to 10 hours by day. I have to way to see a doctor, and the doctor is most of the time unknowledge. The pill he gave me have so side effect that I become more sic

  • Paging the **AA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:21AM (#17017802) Homepage Journal
    Carrying a drive with all the video in the world sounds like a great way to become the target of all the lawsuits in the world. Unless, of course, you have already paid all the money in the world for all the proper licensing rights in the world.
  • There is always a trade-off between quality, disk space, and the power required for decompression. Perhaps we will be happy having all of this video content at today's resolution, but somehow I suspect that we will use up the extra space for quality or for some other reason - like increased battery life. Yet another option is not increasing the storage on the device and bringing the price down. For instance, a 4GB Nano is now roughly half of the price of an original 5GB iPod, and it is much smaller, has a c

  • The barriers are political, not technical (Score:3, Insightful)

    by defile ( 1059 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:22AM (#17017836) Homepage Journal

    We could already be watching all of our TV shows over the internet on-demand.

    The average person isn't watching the bulk of their TV this way because the networks don't want to give up that kind of control. To say nothing about the people who don't even want to control their TV experience. Some people are just happy to flop onto the couch and let a gigantic media corporation design their entire evening's entertainment experience.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kwerle ( 39371 )
      The mods are idiots.

      This is obviously not true. The last movie I watched was Cars. It is just shy of 2 hours. The itunes store says that it is 1.39GB of data, but they are not full DVD quality (though they're close). Hell, let's be really generous and say that 1 hour of tele is .5GB of data.

      Let's say that 10% of the US watches TV at the same time - from 6-7PM west coast time. Let's say that's about 30M users. Now it's time for the easy math: .5GB/user hour * 30M users hour =
      500,000,000B/user hour * 30
  • While storage technology has been growing in capacity at a remarkable rate, transfer speeds seem to be growing at a much slower rate. Let's say I've got an Ipod that can hold all the world's videos -- how long it might it take to get them all to it?

  • Second, we would have the same storage just smaller size. Why have a flash memory MP3 player instead of a hard drive MP3 player? Smaller size. I think anyone who has read anything in the Cyber Punk genre knows about implanted memory. Having a few terabytes of internal memory may start to be common place. Have Wikipedia in the head.

    And yes pissing off the MPAA would be reason enough to make a player that stored all of the world's video.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sakusha ( 441986 )
      Having a few terabytes of internal memory may start to be common place. Have Wikipedia in the head.

      I remember the olden days when we called that "getting an education."

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) *
        I remember the olden days when we called that "getting an education."

        It used to be doctors personally knew about all the drugs you could give a person. Nowadays we have the PDR, and we don't think doctors are worse for it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by miyako ( 632510 )
        A proper education should teach you some basic facts, then focus on how to obtain information, critically process it, and apply it to the task at hand. A proper education should not focus on memorizing the sort of stuff that is best left in a reference until you actually need the information.
    • Have Wikipedia in the head.

      Hmm. The free brain anyone can edit. This conjures up strange images of large groups of people suddenly stopping still with vacant expressions, after being hit by a brain-blanking vandal.

      Then again, that doesn't sound much different than television.
  • I remember discussing this online before, some guy said that someday there will be hard drives big enough to store every song he owns. I said I already have a hard drive that stores every song I own, and my music library is only about 160Gb. I retorted that someday there will be hard drives big enough to store every song ever [I]recorded,[/I] it would be like someone delivering an iPod with the entire iTunes music library already on it, and you'd just need keys to unlock any song you want.
    But there's a prob

  • News Flash (Score:3, Funny)

    by Darth Muffin ( 781947 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:31AM (#17018050) Homepage
    Daton, Ohio, Dec. 2nd, 2017. John Smith, a plumber by trade in Ohio, accidentally plugged in his new 20Petabyte iPod into an unfirewalled port on his home router. As a result every video and movie ever made was unintentionally shared out to the Internet. The MPAA is suing for $14 Trillion.

  • Off by a factor of a bajillion (Score:3, Informative)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:32AM (#17018088) Homepage Journal
    As an exercise in DVR-ology I worked out that by 2016 I should be able to buy enough hard drive space for &lt $500 (today's dollars) to hold all the video I'd want to watch for most of my life online, using a RAID mirror, by just scaling up Moore's Law. OK, so that much data could be un-RAID'ed on an iPod by then.

    But that's just me. Given HD camcorders [amazon.com], YouTube [youtube.com] and 6 Billion people on earth, rapidly becoming technological, "All the Video in The World" is about 6 billion times larger than what we can do next decade - that's several more decades of Moore's Law to contend with.
  • Can't wait to see this video [theregister.co.uk]!
  • Saying an iPOD will be able to store every video ever produced is like saying that eventually will have digital optical discs with enough capacity to hold the whole internet. It misses the point completely. Once upon a time we'd go and buy a good soft repository (like SIMTEL, to name one) in a couple of CDs ... and that would take care of the need to download files off BBSs. Now the internet is more about dynamic content (like Slashdot), and the constant generation of new static content (like new videos up
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Well, IMDB currently lists 471,241 movies. Let's assume those are about 90 minutes each. That's 42,411,690 of video. They also list 367,066 episodes of television shows. Let's assume those are about 22 minutes each (to account for commercials, we'll ignore hour long shows for now). That's another 8,075,452.

    Encoded at 320x240 15fps mpeg-4 that comes to approximately 197TB. I'm willing to bet a kidney we won't have small form factor hard drives capaple of storing that in less than ten years.

    Even if we d
    • Here's the other part of the math:

      Assuming storage doubles every year, in 10 years we'll have 1024 times as much storage. Making the future Ipod's largest offering 80 terabytes. Well, that's closer than I thought it would be, but still not enough storage.

      And your estimate doesn't count all the news, documentaries, home and security video. And that's only today's total video. I imagine in 10 years when every single device has a camera on it that's running all the time, there will be plenty more video out
      • Yeah, I deliberately lowballed the estimates, since the claim was ludicrous without going into extended media.

        Doubling every year is even very optimistic. It took over two years to go from 40GB to 80GB in the 1.8" form factor, and various industry heads project about 40% growth in capacity a year. That puts capacity at more like 2.26TB in ten years.

  • Article needs more context for those quotes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @11:46AM (#17018354) Journal
    Summary:
    iPod to Eventually Hold All the Video in the World?


    Article:Arora said, by 2012, iPods could launch at similar prices to those on sale now and yet be capable of holding a whole year's worth of video releases. Around 10 years down the line that could be expanded, creating iPods that can hold all the music ever sold commercially.Article, II (emphasis mine):
    He said: "In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced?"

    Any != all. I get the weird feeling that either he's tossing speculation around (most likely), or there was a part skipped in the article, where Arora discusses distribution methods, and how video content will be just as (or more) available in digital format as music is now.

    As to his question of "why not" an iPod that can hold all video ever produced (if that is what he was asking), the answer is that there will be no demand for a personal player with that much storage -- and since it will be more expensive than a smaller-storage device that meets the demand for storage volume, the smaller-storge device will win the pricing/distribution war. In light of this, why bother developing an expensive product with little demand?
  • Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your mess

  • Let's hope they leave YouTube's content off... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @12:02PM (#17018690) Journal
    .. because I sure as hell don't need six hundred gigabytes of random footage spliced with various unrelated songs. Think I'm kidding? Do a search on YouTube and half the results that come up are those crap. Of course, bearing in mind that much of the content on youtube is, despite Google's best efforts to remove it, made up of copyrighted material, that may be a good enough reason to keep it off.
  • Well, maybe all the non-pr0n video. Sure, yeah. That might be possible.
  • There's is no way *ever* that any single device could hold all the world's media at any time. We produce media to fill all avaliable space. When technology creates capacity, a demand is created to use it. Once there was only the home service and the world service on the radio. Even I remember when we there were only four TV channels here, because that was all the bandwidth would allow, now we have cable and digital TV and the selection is ridiculous..

    Media expands to fill all avaliable space, that is sum of

  • of storage media is full.

    A couple years ago I put in a 120Gig HD in my computer. Imagine my surprise on moving an install of the latest Dawn of War expansion to my drive to get "No space left on device."

    I cleaned up crap and managed to fit it in, but on my "to do" list is to install a 250 Gig drive I have laying around. This will no doubt get filled 24 months from now.

    And I thought what a vast expanse of storage space I had when I got a 160kB 5 1/4 floppy for my Trash-80 CoCo as a high school gradua

  • Several years ago, an aquaintance of mine argued that I should not go see the Spiderman movie. "You're just wasting your money," he said, "I've already got it downloaded!" (He was like the pusher man, always trying to give you a free fix). After a bit more cajoling, I stepped over to his computer to see what he had. Yup, he had the movie all right. All two square inches of it. Besides confirming my belief that pirates are social ingrates, it also struck home the fact that ultra tiny video resolutions suck.

    S
  • ...iPods will be capable of storing 'any video ever produced.'

    But is that the same as every video ever produced?

    And where does that leave Zune?

  • I remember reading an article published in the 80s instructing people not to bother with CDs because they would soon be replaced with solid state devices. Such devices didn't become practicle until flash-based MP3 players came out in the late 90s, yet they still relied on (honest) people to purchase CDs.

    Thus, I really do believe that at some point it will be possible to buy an ipod-like device that holds entire archives of video and audio... It just might not be readily available until after I retire!

    Th

  • Back in 1990 I did an article called 'The Companion: A Very Personal Computer' for a book on nanotechnology. Using mass storage with roughly the storage density of DNA the 'ultimate convergent device' I envisioned kept 1,000,000 TB in a cubic millimeter. If you can record bits on electron spins then of course your density can go much higher.

    The very first PC's had only a boot-loader OS. Then DOS's were included, then some applications were bundled, and free demo's of software. Now gigabytes of free
  • ...why store locally? Smart caching / syncing will ensure your favourites are available locally on your device / iPod, but why store everything locally? Keep it on a remote server. This will cause less hassle when you lose or damage your device too. Amazed this Google bod was talking the obvious rather than the more imaginative and realistic.
  • My terabyte storage device I got at fry's electronics can't even hold all my tv shows, movies, porn and homemade video clips. The iPod and storage in general has a long, long, long way to go before we can boast of anything, especially a small device that clips on to ones shirt or jacket, being able to hold the entire worlds videos. Of course then the world's videos will be increasing too as more and more people take more video.

    Sure I suppose the point they were trying to make was that the iPod in 10 years t

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