WTFH: Storage, the one word that sums up the future

What the future holds is a column written every Thursday by Adam Berger about the future of technology.

As consumers fill gadgets to the point where they are bursting with digital photos and music, storage is becoming the center of attention. Many products like Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 3 are combating the storage issue by including drives in them (PS3 will have 60 GB of built-in storage, enough to store about 13 movies and a new Samsung phone will have 8 GB built in for music, enough for 2,000 songs). Consumers are now demanding storage, and don’t necessarily mind paying for it either, especially since prices have dropped drastically (I just bought a 1 GB SD card for under $20).

Our favorite company Google is taking notice of this issue and besides continually updating Gmail’s storage (set to hit 3 GB before the end of this year) recently posted a presentation on its website outlining plans for an online storage service called GDrive. It would allow consumers “infinite storage” of their e-mail, Web pages and other data. Google later said the release was an accident and declined to comment further.

Storage is now a must have. But will it be a problem if every device has it’s own storage system and file extension? We all know that an iPod with 60 GB of music can’t be streamed via various hardware or transferred to other personal devices because of Apple’s proprietary DRM. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are great, they look awesome, sound amazing, and either are available (or will be soon) at a local Best Buy. But which product do you buy? Leaving all the A/V discussions behind there is still a storage capacity difference, Blu-ray can hold at least double that of HD-DVD. Many people feared that the DVD would put the CD out of business, that was far from true. People don’t always need 4 or 8 GB of storage, and they won’t need 25 or 50 either. But how nice would it be to store everything on one disc. Blue-ray can do that, HD-DVD cannot.

The cheaper and more plentiful storage gets, the more stuff consumers decide to store, says electronics analyst Ross Rubin at researcher NPD. In 1998, a digital music player with 32 megabytes (MB) of storage cost about $200. Today, you can buy a 2 GB player about 64 times as big for less than $130.

Companies such as CinemaNow and Movielink let consumers download films from the Internet but we need places to store them. Is it any good if you store movies on your PC but you are in the car 3,000 miles away when your kid asks for the movie? No, we need a standard that will allow content to all be on a central location and then is streamed to wherever you are, whenever you need it, whatever device you plan to use it on.

I think this will come sooner than later, either way it is What the Future Holds.