Bill Gates, Microsoft czar and the world's richest man, says there's no future for the DVD (digital versatile/video disc), according to a report published in the German daily Bild.

The world's leading technology guru foresees the DVD technology as becoming 'obsolete in 10 years at the most.'

He said that movie-watchers of the future will find the idea of buying a shiny disc with a movie stored on it 'ridiculous.' He predicted that these movie fans will instead watch films on television sets that will be able to download films and programmes via the Internet.

"The entertainment of the future will definitely not be on a DVD player, that technology will be completely gone within 10 years at the most. When you consider that today we carry music and films around on silver discs and then have to insert them in computers, that is actually pretty ridiculous. These discs could end up being damaged, or simply getting lost," the Bild quoted Gates as saying.

"The TV of the future will show us exactly what we want and when we want," Gates said. "It will know what we don't want our children to see. It will be able to show us a display of family photos and on a command will remove the ones with the mother-in-law in them from the display, if we want it to."

Gates said that 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 should not be allowed to see, said the Bild report.