Today, I am a PC gamer. The nature of that is a consistently full hard drive. With 500 Gigabytes, I fill 450 with installed games. The future of the computer will change that, in an exciting way.
Two years ago, my hard drive was full of music, but Spotify came about and changed that. I no longer needed to keep Mp3s on my computer, I could stream everything I wanted for free.
Four years ago, I was using DVD Decrypter to save films I had on DVD to my hard drive, then converting them to play on my Iriver h10 Media Player with a 1.5 inch screen. Today, I can sit in the parking lot at Food Lion and find a movie on Netflix to watch on my 4 inch phone in seconds.
The industry is moving towards media that takes up no hard drive space. To this end, the service OnLive could someday solve my dilemma of gaming space. They offer streaming options for video games that use a server to store and render, then send you video feeds of the game while you send them input feeds. The service works better than you think, but it has a few huge drawbacks.
Streaming media can be taken away at any time, without notice. In fact, the only game I'd owned on OnLive was revoked. It's main competitor, Steam, does not work as a stream, but as a download. As such, they don't have to pay the streaming loyalties that OnLive pays. Steam has, since 2007, become the number one gaming download service in the world, while OnLive has been on the verge of bankruptcy several times.
The technology trends are moving to streams, but people would really rather have a permanent copy of things they pay for. Spotify and Netflix work because of a disinterest in re-experiencing films and popular music, but Amazon MP3 will always surpass Spotify in my mind because I feel that I own it more.
So, computer tech will work towards a world without local hard drives, and consumers will resist the hell out of it while also embracing it. That is the future.
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