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Technology Stocks : Western Digital (WDC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Citron who wrote (10952)	8/23/2004 8:47:43 PM
From: CFA	Respond to of 11057

Well, I store a ton of media on an external HD. And for the 4 areas I listed, I assume that people are using HDs as well. I'm certainly not an expert on these companies or technologies. However, the reason why I purchased STX and WDC is because I believe that HD firms should benefit in some way from all of the media storage that's occurring now and will occur in the future. My thinking is that the increase in capacity desired will more than offset the falling prices per unit of storage. Anyway, the reason why I posted earlier today is because of the following post from Mark Cuban, which supports the idea of enormous increases in the quantity of storage demanded: blogmaverick.com In the post, Cuban talks about storing HQ media content on HD rather than on DVD I've posted a snippet from his blog below: ------------------------------------------------- I connected the 80gb firewire drive to my HP Media Center PC and to my PC, it was fast enough to play without any problems. I loved it. I loved it, for a ton of reasons. Let me name a few. I know that the price per GBs of an external hard drive is now down under 50c. That price is going to fall further. A lot further as capacities increase. This time next year we should be talking about 1TB (that’s 1,000GBS) drives at 25c per GB or less. The increased capacity means not only that I can stick more HDNet movies or TV shows on a drive and sell them to consumers, but it also means that I can increase the quality of the picture substantially. What few people realize is that when we shoot something in HD for HDNet, the quality we capture the content at is far, far better than the picture quality that you see on your HDTV. We have to compress it to fit in the bandwidth defined by broadcast standards. That compression reduces the quality of the picture you see. Your TV can handle the quality we capture it at, but we don’t have a way to get it to your TV at that quality level — yet. Bigger cheaper hard drives gives HDNet the ability to use that additional storage to hold our content in uncompressed quality and increase the picture quality that you can see on your TV. A bunch. We can take advantage of new cameras to capture at better and better qualities, and of new compression schemes that approach future camera capabilities, only because we have ever expanding storage. That’s something DVDs will never have. So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come. The other cool part is that the video playback devices that will be in your home over the next couple years will have the ability to connect via USB or Firewire to these drives. PVRs, Set top Boxes, Media Center PCs,even DVDs designed to play today’s DVDs and whatever future DVD standard is settled on, all will have the ability to connect to Hard Drives in some shape or fashion, or people wont buy them. There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win. Next on my reasons to love this approach to distribution is that it basically kills off the “Piracy is going to kill us” threats from the big movie companies. Hard Drive storage is expanding far more quickly than upload or download speeds to our homes. The ability to use that hard drive storage to increase the quality and file size of a movie, makes it practically impossible to distribute it over the net. So which is the better way to deliver a movie or movies? On a DVD with a boring, lifeless future, or hard drives?