 Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I wanted to record this video to settle a pub dispute I had recently with an unnamed individual who insisted that optical media is dead. Optical media is not dead. Even when I'm recording this video in September of 2022 and I thought that rather than point you to Amazon which will quickly show that optical media is still around, I thought I'd give two reasons why two user groups who are still keeping the tech alive. So what is optical media? Firstly you probably remember these things that most people today might think are relics of history. We have in today's show until Blu-ray discs, M discs which I've done a ton of videos about on this YouTube channel. What else do people associate with optical media? You might remember these dual cases or these dual case binders that you kept them in and of course the drivers for the drives for actually reading and burning them. So you might think burning a disc when was the last time you did that? Remember when Napster was still a big thing? So there's actually two user groups to the best of my mind who are still using optical media and this is why I actually don't think optical media is going to vanish at least anytime soon. First use case for optical media is backup and archiving. Now this is definitely a sort of niche form of backup and archiving. It's not going to be something that big companies are going to be doing. Big companies for backup tend to use something called tape which most people have not even heard of. Tape is also called LTO. It's actually an extremely efficient form of storage and it's relatively good at keeping data cold i.e not attached to a computer for a long time but the drives that actually are needed to write onto the discs tend to cost a lot. So that's tape linear tape optical or LTO. But for smaller amounts of data that you don't want to degrade optical is always being considered a pretty good option and specifically this form of modified blu-ray that's called the M-Disk which I've talked about and I think it's a really really fascinating technology. It's supposed to keep data safe without any bit rot for up to something like a thousand years. Bit rot by the way for those who aren't storage and data hoarding fiends just means that when you leave data sitting cold on a device whether that's a hard drive or whatever there's a tendency for the data to degrade typically by magnetism and some forms of storage media like hard drive store bits and bytes which constitute data via magnetic polarity and over time that magnetism can lose the the bits literally flip in polarity and that result in data loss. Probably tons more detail to that that's above my pay grade but that's the basic principle. So the number one group keeping optical media going are data fiends which I admit is probably a pretty small amount of people. The second one the second use case for optical media that believe it or not is still relevant in 2022 is what I would categorize as home theater aficionados. So like me you probably have a Netflix account and spend a good deal of your week watching streaming services. Now the problem with streaming services is that they're constrained by bandwidth. In other words the more people in your area that are streaming Netflix all at the same time you might see your internet connection getting a bit slower and YouTube Netflix and other streaming services all have this pretty cool tech that will lower the resolution as your internet as your internet speed drops so that you always guess so that it'll get a slightly worse picture but you won't get buffering. Now this obviously if you're a really really serious home theater aficionado and you want to get the best quality possible the original quality possible that's not going to be something that is going to be of interest to you. So I have up an article from a home theater aficionado website. It says that 4k Blu-ray discs run at up to 128 mbps that's a very impressive data rate. This is that's megabytes per second if I'm not mistaken might be. This is the amount of data sent to your screen every second by contrast streaming services tend to top out at around 17 mbps that's a very big difference and this will drop further depending on the speed of your internet connection as I just said and depending on the wider network as I just said those two things can kind of go in sync because if you're if you have you know DSL or something like that you tend to lose connectivity as other people are streaming. So for sound they're saying that basically it's a little bit closer but that the streaming services will still use a more compressed form of audio because again whenever you're streaming something from Netflix or even from YouTube for that matter the technical priority for the streaming service is to deliver the content not in the very best quality possible but in the best way that can preserve most of the quality while minimizing buffering for the users. So that's about all the technical weeds I want to go into basically optical media isn't dead you can still buy pretty much everything in fact CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, M discs, burners, dual cases all still up there on Amazon and those are the two reasons that it's still going and I think probably for at least a little while longer we're going to be seeing people using it for archival data storage and as well for the home theater aficionado market. Thank you guys for watching.