Video analyst John Ferrick of DVdoctor Inc looks at the year ahead in his crystal ball

When I was writing a column for Computer Video magazine (RIP), I would at this time of year offer my predictions for the coming 12 months. So...

Things we will see this year

* Blu-ray Disc continuing to falter and its rival high-def format HD DVD moving forward

This looks to be the inevitable result of three factors combined - the relative costs of changing the manufacturing equipment (HD DVD is far cheaper than Blu-ray); the fact that Microsoft/Intel are firmly behind HD DVD; the negative impact on Blu-ray and its biggest supporter, Sony, of the whole digital-rights-management disaster suffered in 2005 by music label Sony BMG.

* Dual-core graphics chips, probably from NVIDIA - I think this will be a dual-core single-chip GeForce 7800

* AMD continuing to make more and more inroads into Intel's strongholds

* Toshiba's new 0.85in/4GByte hard drives are already in production and drives of the same size but of 10GByte and beyond will be arriving

This allows for storage space equivalent to a DV tape - but on an extremely small hard drive. It will be this technology that will move camcorders from being tape-based to hard-drive-based. So, yes, that, means that Focus Enhancements will have created a market that the bigger players take control of by providing hardware that is a fraction of the size and cost of FE's devices.

* Just as Sony starts to ship PS3, Microsoft will offer the update to Xbox 360 - keeping the Xbox 360 in front once more

Things we COULD see this year

* Dell and Apple reaching an agreement for a locked-spec Intel-based Dell that runs Apple's Mac OSX

* Some of the shine starting to come off Google

Google has been attempting to move in too many directions and continues to make partnerships with continuing second-tier companies such as Sun (Google CEO Eric Schmidt's former company). Eric - at both Sun and Novell - seemed to have a great knack of creating partnerships where 1+1 equals 1.5

All in all, it should continue to be a very interesting year!

John