It has been announced today that both Sony and Panasonic are joining forces to create the next generation standard for optical discs. The objective with these discs is to expand their potential for long term data storage. Both companies hope to improve their development efficiency through technologies held by each company, their plan is to release optical discs touting a recording capability of at least 300GB by 2015. Sony and Panasonic will continue to hold discussions regarding the specifications related to the development of this new standard.
The focus is primarily towards professional users and businesses that need to archive massive amounts of data. As far as the individual user is concerned, many now store their data in the cloud, so the market potential is definitely greater with businesses for 300GB optical discs. While we’re on the subject of cloud storage, it is possible that cloud-based data centers can use these discs for storing data. To put things in perspective, the current Blu-ray discs are capable of storing 25GB and 50GB on single and dual layer discs respectively. Both Sony and Panasonic are well known manufacturers of Blu-ray discs.