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Google Executive Predicts Future iPod Capacity

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 4:15 PM - by

Could the iPod of the future hold all the video ever sold commercially? Jo Best at silicon.com reported today that a Google V.P. expressed that opinion at the FT World Communications Conference. in London last week.

In a presentation to the conference, Nikesh Arora, V.P. of European Operations for Google said "in 12 years, why not an iPod than can carry any video ever produced?"

There was no mention of the exponentially growing capacity of hand-held storage, the future of magnetic storage vs. other mechanisms or the expected rate of video production. The story does suggest that, until recently, few dreamed of having their entire music collection in their pocket on an iPod. And so what will be the social consequences and commercial prospects of an iPod in 12 years that can contain every video one could ever want? This is fascinating reading.

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 450 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Nov 28, 2006 6:27 pm

Has HD storage been increasing exponentially? Seems to me like it's slowed lately.

To quote http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/film.html :

Quote:
In the years from 1990 to 1995, UNESCO reports that there were 4,250 films produced annually throughout the world. The Motion Picture Association of America reports that for the year 1998, its members released 221 movies (compared to 219 in 1997), while releases by all U.S. companies, including independent film companies, rose from 461 in 1997 to 490 in 1998.

It takes approximately 2 gigabytes to store an hour of motion picture images in digital form using the MPEG-2 compression standard. If the images in 4500 full length movies were converted into bits, the world's annual original cinematic production would, therefore, consume about 16 terabytes.

They go on to estimate that there are about 300,000 motion pictures in existence (that does not count other video, such as TV, homemade or Internet-based content).

16 TB for one year's worth of new films? Yikes! (And HD files will be much bigger.) We'd need PETABYTES to store every movie in existence.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Nov 28, 2006 6:31 pm

Why not the entire Internet in your pocket? That's only a few dozen terabytes, right? It'll happen eventually, probably within the next 20 years.

Then as new content get added, you'll go home and update your iPod by clicking on "Internet Update". Except that instead of getting a piece of software, you'll be updating the entire Internet, as synced on your iPod. LOL, crazy.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Nov 28, 2006 6:40 pm

Today's 80 GB iPod should hold about 20 TB in 12 years.

Assumption: storage capacity doubles every 18 months.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2055 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Nov 28, 2006 6:59 pm

Mikuro wrote:
Has HD storage been increasing exponentially? Seems to me like it's slowed lately.

To quote http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/film.html :

Quote:
In the years from 1990 to 1995, UNESCO reports that there were 4,250 films produced annually throughout the world. The Motion Picture Association of America reports that for the year 1998, its members released 221 movies (compared to 219 in 1997), while releases by all U.S. companies, including independent film companies, rose from 461 in 1997 to 490 in 1998.

It takes approximately 2 gigabytes to store an hour of motion picture images in digital form using the MPEG-2 compression standard. If the images in 4500 full length movies were converted into bits, the world's annual original cinematic production would, therefore, consume about 16 terabytes.

They go on to estimate that there are about 300,000 motion pictures in existence (that does not count other video, such as TV, homemade or Internet-based content).

16 TB for one year's worth of new films? Yikes! (And HD files will be much bigger.) We'd need PETABYTES to store every movie in existence.

That is misleading. It uses the MPEG-2 format, like DVDs (2 hours or so on a 4+GB DVD), but, even that is flexible.

However, the iPod uses MPEG-4 and H.264, which are more efficient compression schemes. The space required also depends upon the "quality" settings (compression of the images and bitrate). I subscribe to the Daily Show on iTunes. Based on those files, an hour of 640x480, 30 fps, 1500+ kbps video would require 684 MB. Now, most movies are NOT 30 fps but 24 fps. I have a Disney cartoon that's 320 x 240, 24 fps, 671 kbps. Extrapolating from it, I get 291 MB per hour. Very different from the above numbers.

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 450 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Nov 28, 2006 10:59 pm

gslusher wrote:
That is misleading. It uses the MPEG-2 format, like DVDs (2 hours or so on a 4+GB DVD), but, even that is flexible.

However, the iPod uses MPEG-4 and H.264, which are more efficient compression schemes. The space required also depends upon the "quality" settings (compression of the images and bitrate). I subscribe to the Daily Show on iTunes. Based on those files, an hour of 640x480, 30 fps, 1500+ kbps video would require 684 MB. Now, most movies are NOT 30 fps but 24 fps. I have a Disney cartoon that's 320 x 240, 24 fps, 671 kbps. Extrapolating from it, I get 291 MB per hour. Very different from the above numbers.

That's true. Apple's movie downloads are around 1.0-1.4GB for a full-length movie at 640x480 (which is in line with the bitrate of your 640x480 show). So change that to 4-6TB per year of movies instead of 16. That would "only" be hundreds of terabytes, I guess. But again, in 12 years, people aren't going to want to use 640x480, they'll want HD. HD movies are larger than DVDs, even with advanced codecs like H.264. So if anything I think the numbers are conservative.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 29, 2006 6:55 am

I agree. We need to 'preverve' the quality of our films (currently 6-8 gigabytes per DVD), not decrease their size and bitrate. Even if the iPod has a small screen, it can be connected to a TV and then we get the full experience of a true quality DVD movie (minus the surround sound though). Also, HD DVD and Blu Ray DVD's will consume a higher amount of storage. This means that the challenge for companies like Apple is to (like previous arguments) ramp up the storage of these devices to ridiculous figures like Petabytes or even Exabytes or Zettabytes. Sounds impossible? Well, to think that computers in the 1990's and earlier had around 32mb of storage (citation needed), and these days we see terrabytes of storage on standard machines. This could be true with the future iPod revolution...

To have all the motion picture ever made squashed onto an iPod though is still a *bit* impossible at the current time and in the forseeable future.

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