Let’s move away from reality for a moment to envision how a Media Center Hard Disk could look like in 5 years time.
If you look at today’s trend, more and more software is available on demand without a need to install anything on your computer. E.g Google has moved traditional word processing and excel as online service or Salesforce.com has moved business software as a service on Internet. At the same time, more and more companies such as Apple and Amazon are serving their digital media files through internet. However, many people do not prefer bringing a computer to their living room, so it would be ideal if someone else could take care of their hardware as a service and endusers could operate a media center through a user interface on their TV. An example of this is TiVo’s integration with a Netflix video rental.
While the quality of video files has become better as HDTVs are getting more popular, video file sizes have become huge. For example, if you subscribe a season pass for one season of a popular TV show on iTunes in HD format, it can easily take tens of gigabytes of your Media Center Hard Disk space. Add couple more movies (5 gigabytes each) and you can easily see your available hard drive space becoming empty. While this can be overcome by getting an external hard drive with large capacity, not all people are willing to go that route.
So, the question is would it make sense to offer all media mainly on demand basis from the “cloud”. In away, Apple’s iTunes is doing that already as it allows you to download the media file you purchased earlier at least once again. This means that you would not store the files on your computer at all, but you could stream or download the movie when ever you need them. Some might wonder how do you then sync your music with an iPod, but this could be easily solved by e.g. selecting which playlists to sync and then an application automatically syncs the music to your iPod. In fact, you would not need a computer to sync your iPod, but it could automatically download them with its built in wireless capability.
When we then take this idea further, what it would mean for the future of Media Center Hard Disk? If we could find most of our media files easily available from the media cloud, we could operate the media center through an internet browser. Then, why not to build a small computer inside a regular TV (ála iMac) with a built-in internet browser. TV could then be equipped with a mouse type of controller so you could do your casual internet browsing and at the same time listen to music. Similarly you could play latest movies or photos from the media cloud.
At the end of the day, many technology savvy people already have so called Media Center Hard Disk at their home as they are sharing media files over the local home network. However, this is way too difficult for the mainstream users, so it would make more sense the offer this media center software as a service. We are already seeing early sings of this trends as Google has announced their Google TV plans. Maybe also have this in their roadmap and we can see e.g. Apple iTV 2.0 sometime in the near future.
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