Quite an intriguing piece over on Marc Cuban's blog about what's gonna be the best way to distribute the content (audio or video) in the future. Many interesting points (check out the part about the vending machines) but I think some of his claims are not based in reality.

The core of Marc's post is that in the future, the best way to deliver content to consumers will be through hard drives due to the constantly increasing storage requirements for a movie. HDTV requires about 18GB per hour for a really good quality. You can't put that much content through the net nor can you put enough movies on a DVD and could squeeze only one  movie or so on a next gen DVD standard.

I agree that HDTV is the future (for some it is already a present) and that most future content will be HD. However I don't see people being that much obsessed with quality. If quality was a number one concern Beta would win over VHS in no time. Heck, look at a recent battle between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray: even though the latter is technologically better the former is cheaper and has easier upgrade path.

What I see as the future is still the 'net. It is the easiest way to deliver content to the consumer and modern distribution channels like P2P are much better than any kind of unicasting techniques. And the quality? Well, let's have a look at what kind of quality you can get through popular P2P networks. While testing my BitTorrent client I ran into what seems to be new quality bar these days - one episode of a TV series encoded from HDTV signal downsized to 960x528 (XVID, essentially a MPEG4) with AC3 2.0 sound. Great quality, fits on one 700 MB CD. Current gold standard (most of the TV episodes are encoded like this) seems to be 624x352 XVID with MP3 audio, also encoded from HDTV source, fits to half of a 700 MB CD. Very good quality.

What we need is a way to legalize the distribution over the Internet. It is quite feasible to distribute full movie with HDTV resolution (1280x720) and AC3 5.1 sound  using a secure P2P platform in a matter of hours. ADSL2+ brings speeds of over 20Mb for prices close to 30-40€ range. P2P already consumes about 33% (at least!) of all bandwidth and it can't all be the music - only video content can consume that much so the need is obviously there.

Forget hard drives - give people good enough content for a decent price and see how it goes.