From what I understand, BluRay discs use another type of encryption that is protected under something more than DVD’s. That is why it is still a bigger NO-NO

If only FedEx would publish an API and put a user-defined QR code on the waybill, we could make them a transparent part of the fabric!

it used to be called “netflix”

… Perhaps the milk jug idea is a bit ridiculous after all…

Please, someone enlighten me on if there has been any development in this area. I would so gladly spend the next month ripping my movies and buying 4TB hard drives if it were legal.

How is the information accessed and indexed?  

Why are we totally ignoring the cost involved here?

I’m not living in another age. Though I have been lucky enough to be part of some experiments along these lines, such as doing the first live streaming of motion capture data between California and Japan with Silicon Graphics, and getting involved in Carl Malamud’s Internet World Expo which built a 45Mbps Internet Railroad around the world in 1996.

More recently (at the past few years of the Tokyo International Film Festival) I have seen demonstrations of live global 4K video, from Cinegrid.org (see  http://cinegrid.kmd.keio.ac.jp/english.html ) which for example enables live connections between studio and filming location, or CAVE connections for education. Obviously these are fabulously resource hungry and only usable for limited use-cases. Whereas the world’s P2P bandwidth or Fedex bandwidth offer alternatives. And how does Hollywood distribute their movies globally? I believe by fedexing a hard drive. Sure, streaming is okay. Unless you are the Australian government with a soda straw for a pipe, or want to actually send a high enough quality file to play in a theater or other big screen.

I’m saying it is prohibitive for any one producer to start mailing hard disks to every country in the world, but if there was an easy to board Internet railroad, or you could think of it as chucking your hard disk into that fabled station wagon as it drives by, just get your content to a single node and would be replicated by fedex and friends and that would be a fabulously enabling global resource.

Think of it another way: Usenet is over 10TB/day. http://www.newsdemon.com/average-feed-size.php

Now consider automatic cascading updates – a petabyte sized repository backing a huge, constantly updated library of 10,000 blue-ray quality (50GB) video titles. That’s 500TB. You don’t have to view every one. But it might be a good use for a town library too, wouldn’t it? And if half of it is commercial content, a small fee could pay for the servers. The media (64GB SD cards) is selling for $50 on Amazon. So it makes sense to think of what kind of an application could make use of postal bandwidth (doesn’t need to be fedex) and I think this might be one of them.

As another data point I was approached last year by a documentary film director who had been tasked at building a very low-cost cultural library of documentary films. His idea was to make a library of USB sticks that fold into a credit card sized piece of plastic, onto which you could affix a printed label like a record cover. A small bookcase would be enough to display a hundred cards – each full of documentaries on a given subject area – which could be copied freely by visitors or viewed there. It seems that postal bandwidth is the only way to maintain an offering like this, and I’m thinking of helping implement it. It would probably be for free or close to it, but could be a useful resource.

At any rate, migrating this data is no fun. We have bonded gigabit connections all over the place and never get to use all of it because hard drives are just too damn slow at reading out data. Anecdotally, the best transfer speeds I see are about 2TB copied per day. If either end of the copy is doing other work, rates rapidly go down from there.

Gonna be a good day when we stop relying on spinning sheets of metal to store our data.. we might actually be able to saturate the network then!

I guess the main thing was trying to make sure we weren’t too hung up on data and information always meaning electronics or photonics.