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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dumbmoney who wrote (35126)	11/24/1999 9:02:00 AM
From: Dave B	Respond to of 93625

dumbmoney, That's true today, but if the bit cost of hard drives continues on the present trend, very soon (3-5 years) it will be cheaper to store video on a hard drive than the equilevent stack of analog tapes. And of course you'll be able to keep a nice size DVD collection on your hard drive as well (the studios are gonna hate that). I'm not sure that's going to be true anytime soon. You can store a 2-hour movie on a tape that you can buy for $4. Since that equates to the equivalent storage of a DVD (roughly 5G to use a round number), you're looking at about $1 per Gig. The cheapest I've seen drives lately is about $99 for 8G (Fry's Electronics) or the equivalent of $12 per Gig. If the price per Gig continues to halve every 18-24 months (my last HDD purchase was an 8G drive for $179 about 2 years ago), then we'll hit the $1 per Gig point in 6-7 years. And even then granularity will be an issue, since the fixed costs mean that you won't actually be able to buy an 8G drive for $8. You'll get a 100G drive for $100. And besides tapes, recordable DVD disks will probably hit the under $1 per Gig price pretty quickly. Then there's the convenience factor. I think it's much more convenient to keep a movie on a tape or DVD disk that I don't have to worry about dropping (especially with 4 small children). From the way the Disney tapes get tossed around and then still run, I'm convinced that Disney must put their tapes through Tempest testing. And from a granularity point of view, I can lend a friend a single movie on a DVD (I wouldn't want to loan him a $100 100G drive). On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to load up a hard drive with a dozen movies and pop it into a slot on the dashboard of the car to let the kids watch movies on a long trip rather than deal with a stack of DVDs or tapes. So, having rambled about all that, I would agree that there will probably be a mix of technologies. I like the Tivo idea for the quick and dirty, pause-the-show-while-I-answer-the-phone, record-my-favorite-television-shows-while-I'm-on-vacation types of uses. I think they'll be very successful, and that should translate into additional products that use hard drives in the AV world. Dave

To: dumbmoney who wrote (35126)	11/24/1999 9:46:00 AM
From: jetcityrandy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Yeah, It seems the Performing Arts - audio recording artists and video artists are going to balk at ANY digital reproduction techniques...I suppose if there were a "royalty" on each and every Read/Write DVD cassette sold that went to the "Perfoming Artists" fund, they may be placated for awhile. But wouldn't it be nice if you could store your old home movies, camcorder movies etc on a DVD, index the "chapters" and be able to show Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary your family pix from Christmas 1993, and quickly and easily zip to the 1997 European vacation clips within seconds? Of course, there will always be some folks who feel they have to "steal" a DVD movie, and store it on their own DVD device. But then, aren't we doing that now with VHS tapes?? I sure hope that DVD doesn't go "down the tubes" as digital tape did about six or seven years ago. Didn't the "Performing Artists" union put the nixie on that? Just to keep this On Topic, Looks like rambus opening flat to down this morning. Buying opportunity yet? Or wait till next week?