A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.
2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.
And they say physical media is dead!
The average lifespan of a starling is usually between two and five years.
This just gave me an idea for a new movie rental service. You’ll never own anything. If we can get homing pigeons to learn movies, we could cut delivery costs
They tried to make this a thing once :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-D
If Disney did this, they’d probably just poison the birds so they die faster.
Capitalism at its worst. Here let’s make more plastic garbage so that you have to buy more things.
Is it a subscription though? Investors like that
A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we’re gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
A murmuration could do it
I like Benn Jordan a lot but I really doubt a bird can sing 2 MB / s. I saw the spectrogram and it looked pretty fuzzy
You could find out which frame of the movie starlings like the best