In many parts of our country and, for that matter, the rest of the world, video on demand is increasingly available. You can demand standard video as well as HD video.
I use Amazon's service because it's by far the easiest to use. I scroll through whatever I want, select it and within a few seconds it starts to play. Netflix and Apple have similar services. I can only imagine how many millions of people do the same thing nightly. That's a lot of streaming. The bandwidth to stream a video is huge compared to that of a high resolution file.
I wonder if this model may become the standard we move to in the future for music? With Sony and other big labels jumping back on the high resolution bandwidth, might it be viable for a "NetMusic" service to crop up? A service streaming on demand music from all the labels at either standard CD or "HD" resolution? And might that service allow me, the user, to have 24 hour access to that music, just like the movies?
The plans one could envision are endless. For $19.95 a month you can stream as much of anything you like, any time you like. Or maybe on demand individual downloads. When I add up the number of CD's and downloads I purchase each month, examine how many albums/tracks I actually listen to, it's maybe 20 albums a month; tops.
When I look at my CD library, when I look at my storage on the hard drive I have thousands and thousands of tracks. I don't listen to thousands and thousands. But I have them. I would love to have more. Fact is, 99% of my library will never be played by me. Like going to a book library, 99% of those books won't be read by me, but it's nice they are there just in case.
Think of the size your library could be with such a service. No, not the Spotify or MOG of today. I mean music available in full CD or HD quality resolutions: DSD and PCM with a million or more albums in the library. Bandwidth is easily 1/10th that of a standard resolution video and there are easily 10 times more people who might be interested in this service. But maybe not. Maybe Spotify and MOG's compressed music formats are good enough for most?
Not for me, not for what Sony wants to do. Could be interesting.
