Bandwidth = Storage = Processing Power - Call for Ideas

I work a lot with consumer electronics companies. One of the key challenges that these companies agonize over in the product design process is the finding the right mix between storage, bandwidth, and processing power.

In each circumstance, the surrounding constraints are different:

• Home: Bandwidth (DSL) is cheap, and so is electrical power, so you you can heavy on both of those.
• Car: Bandwidth is expensive (EVDO) but electrical power is cheap, so you have lots of storage and processing power, but perhaps not so much bandwidth
• Hand: bandwidth is expensive, but mass storage can be either bulky or very expensive, and processing power will drain your limited battery life.

I have seen few products that deftly manage the mix between all three. Also, developers of components tend to be in one of the three areas, so they are more often looking for the optimal solution for themselves rather than to total optimal solution for the customer or situation.

The iPOD is a relatively elegant solution that uses bandwidth when it is cheap (at your home PC) and storage where it is cheap (on the handheld). Another product that has been slower to take off is Motorola's iRadio. iRadio mixed streaming content that was live - news, talk - with stored content that could be downloaded in advance - such as music.

Solutions to-date have typically traded off bandwidth and storage. What has not yet been part of the equation is processing power. I believe that in video games, processing power could be a substitute for bandwidth or storage capacity. Advanced processors can handle far more advanced codecs and fill-in more scenery in a video based on algorithms rather than stored video frames.

I'm actively trying to seek out more solutions where processing power, storage, and bandwidth can be used interchangeably and to develop a framework for automatically deciding where and how that substitution can be made based on what the end user is choosing to do.

Ideas?