Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008...6:13 am - Peter Giles
Less discs in landfill?
The LAMP team have been packing up our offices at AFTRS in North Ryde in preparation for the big move into our new building at Sydney’s Fox Studios. In the process, a lot of paper, DVD’s and CD-R’s have gone into the wheelie bins and we’re hoping that in future we’ll be accumulating a lot less physical media. Smaller desks and the open plan space in our new building may help us to become more disciplined but realistically there need to be more on demand options out there before we can truely make a change.
It makes sense in the digital age to rely less on physical media, to read more from the screen and to upload those photos to Flickr rather than burning endless discs. Granted, we have to keep more of those server farms ticking over, but overall, cutting down on our reliance on physical media makes the most environmental sense. So it was with a certain sense of irony that this post caught my eye while I was standing in a sea of discarded discs in the ruin of my office today
With HD DVD’s only pronounced officially dead a few short months ago it seems Sony are launching a digital download service of video to their PS3 console in North America. The big question is, will this kill the Blu-Ray format before it’s had time to take off? XBox Live is obviously a huge part of the reason Sony are going down this path because they have launched their own successful download service which makes a huge archive of TV and movies available on demand and much of it at HD resolution. With Apple, Microsoft and Sony aggressively pushing these online services and our own Foxtel about to launch the next IQ PVR in Australia (complete with broadband connectivity) how long will it take before this cuts in to our addiction for the humble DVD? Our new minister for communications Stephen Conroy has obviously got his work cut out for him but once those broadband speeds get up there I for one am happy to clear my shelves of discs and consume my movies and TV exclusively on demand. And I’m thinking of investing in a sculpture to put on that empty shelf in the office.
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