Will Sony’s Blu-ray Be The Last DVD Format?

It seems like only yesterday that CDs became the medium of choice for music and data storage. Then DVDs took over the video world with high quality and hours of entertainment.

Today, I downloaded the latest version of Disc Cover and wondered how much longer I’ll use it to create covers for CDs and DVDs.

I intended this missive to be a review of one of my favorite Mac utilities from one of my favorite Mac software developers, BeLight. The latest version of Disc Cover is out and it’s a nice upgrade to an already stellar tool.

Disc Cover makes labels for your CDs and DVDs. It comes with a bunch of professionally developed designs so you don’t have to be an art major or Photoshop wiz to make a nice cover.

It also prints covers for CD and DVDs boxes, but isn’t limited to just music and video. Anything you can stick on to a CD or DVD needs a label, right?

Sometimes I backup files on to a DVD and move them out of the house and to a safe deposit box. The DVDs need a label. Sometimes I create a mini-movie of a family or friends event and need to distribute copies. Blank discs don’t cut it. Labeled discs make it look like I know what I’m doing even if my movie says otherwise.

I got out of printing photos because it was expensive and time consuming.

These days I just whip up a little slide show, park it on a CD, and distribute the raw photos to friends and family. Each CD has a label.

Disc Cover goes beyond just the physical medium labels. It prints tray inserts, mini-disc labels, VHS wrappers, folded booklets, and more, and uses paper layouts from Avery, Neato, Memorex. It even prints using direct-on-CD printers via LabelFlash and LightScribe direct printing.

There you go. An excellent Mac application that does more than you expect, and does it well. Affordably priced. From a Mac developer with other software stars.

As I installed the latest version, it occurred to me that it won’t be long and there may not be much of a need for CDs. I have a small cassette recorder but can’t remember the last time I used it for recording or playing back audio.

My video camera uses DVCAM tape and that’s considered old fashioned as newer High Definition video cameras use solid state flash memory instead of tape.

See? The world is changing.

Apple’s MacBook Air doesn’t come with an Ethernet connector, or a built-in CD/DVD SuperDrive, relying instead on wireless Internet connectivity. I haven’t bought a music CD in three or four years because of iTunes Store, now ahead of Wal-Mart in music sales in the US.

The trend is unmistakable. Already I’m downloading major applications from the Internet instead of rushing out to buy the CD or DVD version. My mother’s home is wired with DSL so she gets many family photos and movies but without the CDs and DVDs.

A news report the other day said that 40-percent of music sold in the US in a few years will be download only. Are we witnessing the inevitable demise of storage media such as CDs and DVDs? How much longer before we don’t buy CDs or DVDs? Without them, we won’t need labels, right?

Internet connectivity is rapidly becoming the new transport medium for digital music, TV shows, movies, photos, and data. Sony won the latest DVD war with Blu-ray edging out HD-DVD (too hard to pronounce anyway). Will Sony’s Blu-ray be the last of the transport storage media? Is it the beginning of the end for the DVD? Yes.