Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
Originally you said free wireless that pretty much never has outages. I'm pretty sure you can chalk that up under "never".
|
I still wouldn't put it under never. Some european countries already provide free internet--as do some cities in the US. So the free part can happen.
Almost never being down simply requires having a complex system of back ups in place. There will always be outages, but they can be limited. Hell, I have at most one or two days a year that my internet is down for a few hours.
Quote:
The same will happen that always happens, as bandwidth speeds go up. so do the bandwidth requirements. Could everyone easily stream today's version of a movie with the bandwidth speeds/availability we'll likely have in 50 years, probably. But by then the data formats will be an equal number of orders of magnitude larger as well. 50 years from now, movie/book/song digital data will also look a lot different than it does today. It's not just one side of the equation that will scale upwards.
It'd be like kids 20 years ago talking about how fast they could play the latest 4-bit graphics game on a "futuristic" computer compared to their 25MHz PC. Sure, we've got 4GHz PCs now, but not many people want to play 20 year old games on them. Modern content stresses modern hardware, they go hand in hand.
|
Fair points I suppose. But there's only so much higher resolution on movies, for example, can go and get appreciable benefit to the human eye. So to some regard there's a limit on how big media files can get. We'll have 3D etc., but that shouldn't really take much more space etc.
But you are right that it will be a challenge for bandwith speed to keep up as it always has been.
Two huge areas where the human race is doing a pathetic job at innovation is speed of data communications and the global infrastructure for it. And battery technology (or alternate power sources for portable devices).
But in any case, if I can't stream most any content I want in 15-20 years I'll be very dissappointed.
But I think we'll get there. Netflix already has what, 15,000 movies to stream. A pittance of all the films ever made, but a pretty big number given current technology and a streaming service that is a free add on to a disc rental service. So I'd be shocked if they (or another comopany) didn't have most every movie I'd want to watch streaming in 20 years.