In addition to everything else that has been stated in this thread already, I also believe we can think of consumer media technology as following two diverging strands, in particular from the 80s onwards. One is the high fidelity approach. High quality stereo reproduction systems, quadraphonic, 5.1 and ambisonics are all positioned somewhere along this trajectory.
The other is instead emphasizing mobility and an individualized media experience. The cassette, walkman, ghettoblaster, mp3 files, iPod, laptop, iPhone and streamed music are all parts of this tendency. The philosophy is that once a certain degree of audio quality has been reached, mobility is more important than further improvement of quality/fidelity. With the iPod with a screen, iPhone, iPad and video on demand we can see the same tendency starting to unfold for moving image as well. My guess is that iTunes in the coming years will be more successful at distributing video content to the home market than BluRay disks, in spite of the latter having better quality by far. Cloud-based video content is more accessible than the physical BluRay disks as you have to head over to a shop or video rental place to fetch, and the quality of iTunes videos is or eventually will get "good enough". Similarly I believe that the relative amount of video watched on iPads and other kinds of portable tablets will increase in the future as compared to HD TV. The Apple TV is already suggesting that in the future TV to a larger degree will be a supporting device for tablets, rather than remain the main device for controlling and watching TV and video content. Cheers, Trond _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
