DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years at the latest, Microsoft boss and founder Bill Gates predicted. Asked what home entertainment would like in the future, Mr Gates said that DVD technology would be "obsolete in 10 years at the latest. If you consider that nowadays we have to carry around film and music on little silver discs and stick them in the computer, it's ridiculous," Mr Gates said in comments reproduced in German in the mass-circulation daily Bild. "These things can scratch or simply get lost."

Mr Gates' vision of television of the future was: "TV that will simply show what we want to see, when we want to see it. When we get home, the home computer will know who we are from our voice or our face. It will know what we want to watch, our favourite programmes, or what the kids shouldn't be allowed to see."