I still read the IMDb Studio Briefing everyday, though it gets a little discouraging. I sometimes wonder if there will ever be anymore interesting multimedia tech news. I should have more faith: New Movie Media Devices Predicted. Really, the story here is that IBM has developed a new, giant capacity yet very small storage method. This is one of those curious situations where they don’t mention how large capacities can possibly reach but instead express the capability in terms of how much media the thing might theoretically hold. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to decide what the average size of a ‘song’ or ‘movie’ might be and compute from there.

Remember the days when CD-ROM storage capacities were expressed in terms of how many printed documents it could hold? Later, the benchmark was number of pictures, then songs. Now it’s movies. This article cites that a device built around the memory could hold the 3500 movies or 1/2 million songs. Thus, the average movie is ~140 times larger than the average song.

The weirdest aspect of the articles floating around is that the hypothetical device would come with 3500 movies prepackaged and the consumer would purchase codes to activate individual movies.

Given recent media consumption trends, there’s little reason to doubt this strategy.