Last information I had puts the world's first, commercially sold, optical storage device at one to two years away. To appreciate the future market, one should remember the technology competition between disk drives and bubble memory.

hot_pastrami:

Life. Combination of the compnay we were talking to going under and changes in my life and 2 of the other devs. We had a device that was about the size of a classic mac, wasn't very loud and could serve up everything, running on linux of course. Interface was really the only thing left needed. There are still 2 dev samples that the guys are using personally.

The project was actually a platform for experimenting with metadata generation systems. To that end if was fairly effective. We didn't get as far as we would have liked (complete auto-metadate generation for all imported media) but we did a fucking good job getting close.

Was before it's time really, too expensive and geeky for the mainstream but I'll bet a grand that in 10 years we'll all have something like it in our houses.