My sister and I just recently subscribed our dad to the Blockbuster online movie rental program. Let me just say that he absolutely loves it. That is, he goes home everyday from work and just pops in a DVD. On weekdays, he's the biggest couch potato you'll ever see.

That isn't a big problem. The problem is that he wants to DVD Shrink each and every one of them. Why is that the problem? Is it the "pirating" aspect? No. Is it that he'll never watch said DVDs ever again? Not really.

The problem I see is that DVDs are just like those nasty VHS tapes. They linger on, without ever really dying off. My parents still have a cabinet full of VHS tapes. Their neighbors have stacks of the same VHS copies. Soon, it'll be a cabinet of DVDs. Just you wait. HD-DVD and Blueray are just around the corner.

Physical media, yes necessary and generally great at storing information stuff, is just a big old plain nightmare of clutter when it comes to movies and music that is already replicated hundrends of thousands of times over. I want my on-demand streaming over a super fast network!