Visit any new media trade show and every hardware manufacturer will be demonstrating a digital TV set-top box with an enormous hard disc for local storage of video content. However, very few will give you a launch date or a price for the product - see our "Digital Rights" page to understand why!

One thing is certain - hard disc capacity will continue to increase. Moore's Law (which was postulated in the 1990s) was based on an analysis of how PC capabilities have improved over time, and stated that hard disc capacity, processing speed and memory double every 18 months without any increase in the PC price. Today the rate of advancement is somewhat higher than this, and we are seeing a doubling every 12 months with consistently falling prices.

Today, domestic PC packages are advertised with specs up to: 

Can the growth continue? We think so. Intel recently announced a new chip packaging technology called bumpless build-up layer (BBUL) which should increase its semiconductors' processing power by around ten times over the next five years. The new technology will allow chips to be made that contain over a billion transistors and run at 20GHz (today's 2GHz Pentium 4 has "only" 42 million transistors).

As regards hard disc storage, we really don't see any limit. Let's put today's 80GByte hard drive in the context of video storage. Today's MPEG2 broadcast television services run at 2-3MBit/s, so the PC you bought your children at Christmas will be able to store 50-80 hours of broadcast quality video on the hard disc. Compare this to your video cupboard at home.....

Looking ahead, assuming hard disc capacity continues to double every 12 months we expect to see the first PCs with Terabyte hard discs during 2007 (a Terabyte or 1TByte = 1,000GByte). Hard disc technology won't be the only thing to improve by 2007 we can realistically expect the bandwidth required for broadcast quality video to fall significantly as well. Today's MPEG2 broadcast quality achieved at 2-3MBit/s can already be reproduced using MPEG4 video plus MP3 audio within a total bandwidth of about 1MBit/s. Looking forwards, by 2006 we can realistically expect broadcast quality video to be accommodated within (say) 512kBit/s. So the PC you will buy your children for Christmas 2007 will be able to store 4,000 hours of broadcast quality video on the hard disc. Again, compare this to your video cupboard at home....

It's interesting to look ahead a further decade, to 2017. Doubling the hard disc capacity every 12 months results in a three order of magnitude increase over ten years, so the 1TByte hard discs we expect to see in 2006 will have increased to 1PByte hard discs by 2017 (a Petabyte or 1PByte = 1,000TByte = 1,000,000GByte). We won't speculate what bandwidth will be required for broadcast quality video in 2017, but simply suggest that a 1PByte hard disc will probably be able to store every television programme, every audio recording, and every piece of web content ever made. 

From here, we look for the introduction of the Home Area Network (HAN), with every PC, every TV set, every printer, every PDA, and every telephone in the house (plus probably the fridge, microwave and dishwasher) hooked onto a wireless network that can deliver any chosen item of content to any chosen device. 

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