> I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates.

The latter sure seems a lot more likely than the former, my man.

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mapontosevenths 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You would think so, but the prices keep going up and the bitrate keeps going down. Some of that is up to codec and encoding improvements, but I think a lot of it is just that they know they can get away with it.

If you'd have asked me 20 years to bet on whether streaming or shiny disks would be producing better quality audio/video in 20 years my money would NOT have been on disks but here we are. Ye Olden Plastic Disk's are still kicking streaming's butt even though I have 2.5Gbps fiber now.

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KK7NIL 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Prices keep going up and bitrates down because most streaming services (except for Netflix and YouTube) have been basically break-even or money losing for years now, and the appetite for that is cooling.

Also, display resolution is not scaling like it used to. The move up from 4k to 8k is far more expensive and less worthwhile than the previous jumps.

So, I think your assumptions about the business side of streaming and the way the hardware is scaling are wrong and we will, in fact, not see physical media make a comeback.

	▲	mapontosevenths 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're probably right, sadly. The best case we could reasonably expect would be better quality streams, but I don't seriously believe that will happen either. There are some niche services like the one that you can only get on Sony TV's that stream at like 50% of UHD bluray's bitrate - and that might be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future unless these services are forced to compete on quality or people decide to care about 8k or something.