The problem is that the size of media has been growing exponentially.
When I keep wondering how my phone is running out of space every time its images / videos. Even when you look at an app that is like 400 MB its not 400 MB of code, its like 350 MB of images and 50 MB of code.
I’d argue media storage usage is starting to level off somewhat because we’re approaching the limits of human perception. For movie content people with average to good eyesight can’t tell the difference between 4K and 8K.
Environmental regulations also bite, an 8K tv that’s “green” is going to have to use very aggressive auto dimming. Storage capacity growth to me looks like it’s outstripping media size growth pretty handily.
Now this isn’t to say I can’t think of a few ways to use a few yottabytes of data but I don’t think there is a real need for this for media consumption. You might see media sizes increase anyways because why not store your movies as 16K RAW files if you have the storage, but such things will become increasingly frivolous.
I would agree with you; but as technology improves we move the goalposts.
iPhones for example capture a small collection of images at the same time which are able to be replayed as a small animation (or loop) called “Live photos”.
I am certain the future will hold for us: video which allows us to pan left and right.
Interestingly enough I've been messing around with ffmpeg recently and the newest high end codecs (VVC / h266) drop HD video size by 30% or more, it's pretty crazy.
It'll be very interesting where AVIF and similar next generation image formats go in the near future, hopefully we'll get some reduction from the exponential growth.
>I’m sure we’ll see it rise, especially in the age of generated textures and materials.
if generative AIs get good enough then I suppose at some point the data transmitted for games and media could be significantly less than now -- you'd 'just' need to transmit the data required for the prompt to generate something within some bounded tolerance.
Imagine a game shipping no textures, generating what was needed on the fly and in real time to fulfill some shipped set of priorities/prompts/flavors.
we're not there yet but it seems like on-the-fly squashing of concepts into 'AI language' is going to be a trend in lossy compression at some point.
There are actually a lot of procedural games out there, I think No Man's Sky uses some of those techniques, but they definitely have been around since the 80s. The thing now is that the fidelity can be much higher, for sure.
When I keep wondering how my phone is running out of space every time its images / videos. Even when you look at an app that is like 400 MB its not 400 MB of code, its like 350 MB of images and 50 MB of code.