[longtermmemmory]

which brings up an interesting question.

How long till spinning disks are gone entirely?

You can by a 1gb sd chip for 5-10 dollars if you shop around.

4 gb chips are now 30 dollars and falling.

512 mb jump drives are freebie giveaways.

With high end monitors with sd slots why would we need a “player”?

[Brett66]

Yeah, TV’s could have an integrated DVR, you might even have an option to download any new movies. A separate DVD or DVR would be unnecessary.

[Myrddin]

A BluRay disk holds 50 GB. Bandwidth is important as well. The cheap SD disks are often fairly slow memory. I purchase the very fast ones for my digital cameras to reduce latency between shots. Those don't come cheap.

The industry is anxious to eliminate optical disks in favor of broadband distribution. Completely network dependent. That's not feasible in my area. The best networking in town is far too slow. A network approach would allow a pay per view distribution with a license that lasts for a limited time. The studios and content providers would love to have a repeat revenue stream on the same title if they can pull it off.