I recently realized how at our house we have slowly migrated much of our physical media to digital format.
Digital photographs have been the norm for us since 1999, we now have over 10,000 photos is our sorted collection, and we manage over 250GB of digital photos. We still have 10 years worth of old photographs sitting in albums awaiting to be scanned - as time permits, but every new photo since 99 has been digitally recorded.
Music - we transitioned to digital music just over 12 months ago, our collection now includes over 9,000 songs in over 400 albums that were painstakingly converted by my father during a visit last year. The music collection is over 50GB in size. After converting our CDs to digital we then transitioned to purchasing songs/albumns directly in digital format, using the iTunes music store.
Video - we are still DVD bound in our house, with a few old children VHS tapes. I have been meaning to convert the VHS to digital but haven't gotten around to it yet. In the US, there isn't a legal way to convert our DVDs to the hard-drive. We wait impatiently for a digital video store to come online with support for Macs (CinemaNow and Movielink are Windows only stores). iTunes, hopefully under a new name, is due to provide full-length videos by end-of-year. I can't wait.
TV - TV usage in our house is very limited, we will watch the odd sports event (cycling, F1, MLB finals, ...) and maybe once in a while local news or some other program. We used to be huge fans of TIVO, having bough one of the first models in 98/99 (which still works btw). We experimented with Windows Media Center for a while but couldn't handle the inferior performance compared to TIVO. I can't remember when was the last time that we watched a primetime TV show during its on-air time slot - the few shows we watch were always TIVOed. This all changed when iTunes started offering primetime TV shows. Ever since then, we purchase our ad-free primetime shows directly from iTunes (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, 24). Our TV library is now approaching 30GB in size.
News - I can't remember the last newspaper that we ever subscribed to. 99.9% of our current news comes from the internet, in the form of newspaper websites (New York Times, WSJ, Seattle Times), traditional TV news sites such as BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and now various blogs. We like the recent trend of more and more news stories being offered in video format. Unfortunately most Mac users are unable to access most of these videos (for example: BBC and MSNBC) - the internet needs an open video format/technology that works across all platforms. I am always surprised how a corporation like the BBC is willing to offer a video format that only works on Windows PCs.
Books - our children books are still 100% in paper format, but our own books are now evenly divided between paper format, digital audio format (iTunes Audible partnership), and soft-copies (O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf). 95% of our book purchase happens online - amazon.com, iTunes, or O'Reilly. However, technology has yet to offer a more compelling reading experience than a paper-bound book. While we enjoy having books available in digital form for quick reference and searching, nothing yet beats the feel of reading a paperback.
With all said and done, including our digital documents and emails, we have over 500GB of data that we need to backup and maintain. Current OS technology provides little support for the cataloging, indexing, and browsing of this vast digital collection, leaving the end-user to manually sort and organize the data. We need better data browsers and better cataloguing systems build into today's PCs to help the user transition to a truly digital world. A our data needs to be able to freely move across our devices: PCs, PVRs, TVs, Portable Media Players, Cell Phones, Cars, etc... Only then, will we be able to truly live in a digital media world.
Cristiano Pierry
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