Sony & Panasonic Next-Gen Optical Discs Moving Forward 250
jones_supa writes "From last summer you might remember the Sony & Panasonic plans to bring next generation optical discs with recording capacity of at least 300GB. Various next-gen optical discs from different companies have been proposed, but this joint effort seems to be still moving forward. The disc is called simply Archival Disc and, roadmap and key specifications are out. First-wave ADs are slated to launch in summer of 2015 and will be able to hold up to 300GB of data. Archival Discs will be double-sided, so this works out to 150GB of data per side. Future versions of the technology will improve storage density, increasing to 500GB (or 250GB per side) and 1TB (500GB per side) as the standard matures."
Nothing about shelf-life. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:2, Informative)
Bandwidth isn't cheap in some areas...
Here come the flippers (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What are these shiny discs you speak of? (Score:5, Informative)
Ten years ago, I had a pretty large DVD collection. I still do, I guess, though it's archived in big folders now rather than the original cases, for space reasons. I was in no way unusual in that; almost everybody else I knew at the time had a DVD collection.
Today, I actually have a relatively large blu-ray collection. But nobody else I know does. In my case, I have the large blu-ray collection because I watch a lot of anime and support for that on streaming services is patchy (Crunchyroll isn't bad, but older shows do vanish from it with no notice sometimes). But if I wasn't interested in niche stuff, there'd be no practical (as opposed to philosophical) reason to continue to collect physical media.
With a large collection of the movie-buying public having looked at blu-ray and gone "meh", I think the challenge of trying to movies to a new generation of optical media is probably insurmountable.
And the other uses of optical media?
The newly launched games consoles have blu-ray drives - but I suspect they're the last generation to support optical discs. More and more sales are shifting online and that proportion will only grow as broadband speeds improve. Even for online-only refuseniks, Vita-style memory-card distribution may prove more convenient in the long run. I honestly cannot remember the last PC game I bought via a physical copy. Probably the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft - because I guessed that Blizzard's download servers would die on launch day.
And for data archival? My experience of writable CDs, DVDs and BDs is that they're time-consuming to write to, physically fragile, space-inefficient and unreliable over time. If I want a local backup these days, I pick up an HDD, fill it up and then store it away.
So yeah, this all feels a bit like nugatory effort...
Re:Nothing about shelf-life. (Score:4, Informative)
Bit rot actually does mean what he thinks it means. And it means what you think it means too [wikipedia.org]. Both uses for the term are correct.