[aruanan]

If that happens, DVD and BluRay will be dinosaurs looking for the dinosaur burial grounds, with only a few years of viability left as people move over to the much more portable format.

How much would companies save on packaging? I'd love not to have those crappy CD/DVD cases breaking all the time. Of course, album art would be a whole lot more difficult on something the size of a small postage stamp.

[Swordmaker]

How much would companies save on packaging? I'd love not to have those crappy CD/DVD cases breaking all the time. Of course, album art would be a whole lot more difficult on something the size of a small postage stamp.

I think the in-home, album art package will be about the size of a postal card... the in-store retail blister packs will be about the same size as currently—too big to slip into a thief's pocket—and still hard to open.

[Terpfen]

Of course, album art would be a whole lot more difficult on something the size of a small postage stamp.

Not really. It just means the boxes will be smaller, but they'll still have to be large enough to be visible on shelves, to protect the contents, and to contain any promotional material packed inside.

The Nintendo DS plays games on a custom format derived from the SD Card. The games ship in hard plastic cases that are about the same dimensions as a CD case but deeper, and with thicker plastic, particularly on the side edges. It's safe to assume that, if and when Flash media replaces optical discs for movie/music distribution, the box of a Nintendo DS game will serve as a reference when designing the packaging. Plenty of room for album art. Though I would suppose movie boxes would have a more rectangular shape that would resemble scaled-down DVD boxes.