I recently purchased a Philips DVD player, which I would rather call as a media player than DVD player because of the USB port that it has. Through the USB port, I can play MP3, WMA, MP4, JPEG, DAT and DivX files among a host of other formats. Apart from media players, USB ports have now slowly started appearing on digital televisions and monitors too. New LCD television sets like the LG scarlet now feature USB ports through which one can play media files like JPG and MP3. At this moment it appears like the TV manufacturers are not including DiVX and H.264 support on the television sets itself fearing cannibalization of their own media players. But this is set to change as more people opt for digital media in which case you can slowly see decoders appearing on the television set itself.
On the other hand, the optical media business is still set to stay on for some more time as newer HD formats like Blue Ray are catching up fast. This doesn’t mean that we will start seeing TVs with optical media drives built in. Many small TV manufacturers have tried this in the past, but it never caught up. The reasons are simple. Optical drives are bound to fail faster when compared to the longevity of a TV set. Most TVs are sold only because of boredom rather than electrical failures. Also, you do not want to send your 60″ TV for repair because the built in blue ray drive failed. They are better kept separate.
Devices like the Kodak HD Player and XBOX 360 could easily extend your PC and bring digital media wirelessly to your Television set. All these devices point to a “solid state media management” in the future, which could see Televisions which support multiple digital media formats. Five years from now, Blue Ray may not exist and we will see movies distributed in USB drives.