If I recall correctly, the new MPEG-4 Lossless Audio codec would be ready by now. I don't know if it is, but i'm a little concerned about what will happen to the current lossless scene. I'm an happy wavpack user, and I of course want to see it adopted by as many hardware vendors as possible. I'm a little bit concerned about the new standard, though. It'll probably won't be as efficient as wavpack, or even flac, but since it'll be the standard that's probably the safest bet for big companies. I don't really see Ahead, Nokia, iRiver or Microsoft adopting any other lossless format (besides wav) when the new standard is mature.
How do you reckon this will affect us, home users? Maybe it won't affect us at all if the license is as probitive ($$) as Meridian Lossless Packing...

I won't comment on speed (kinda senseless since I only saw the reference implementation), but for compression performance the reports generally compare to Monkey's Audio.

There are 2 lossless MPEG codecs in the works but AFAIK neither is "ready" at this point.

Adoption is anybody's guess. Both MS and Apple already have their own formats.

I'd be an idiot to tell what is going to happen but I'll surely tell what I hope to happen and what I aim for to happen.

Companies never liked MP3. Sony struggled for the longest of times before accepting that MP3 was here to stay. Why would we wanna have something different happen with the lossless standard? Let's face it, most are really satisfied with MP3s (especially the 192kbps Lame encoded). So the lossless standards are aimed at a smaller group of people, professionals you might say. Why would professionals switch from FLAC/Wavpack or whatever (I'm strictly using FLAC as HW vendors seems to approve of it)? Let them make their patented royalty based standard, but as long as consumers buy and prefer equipment supporting these FREE (free in all of it's meaning) codecs, HW vendors will produce units for it. Big players will have to adapt to that fact just like they did with mp3.

However, the movie industry might go for their patented standards as the patent free industry is lagging behind in technology (BBC is doing some good stuff as far as I know though). With music, patent free has the upper hand, thanks to many of the people like Josh Coalson (My thanks go to you as a FLAC user).

Keep your format and go hard hitting against the industry and make them adapt.

Since it's lossless, you can always transcode. Ooh a lossless format with tagging? Wow I've never seen that before!