Sony, Panasonic to develop Blu-ray successor

The two firms have said they plan to create a new brand of optical disc by 2015 that will be capable of holding at least six times more data than a standard Blu-ray disc.

Over the last two years, both Sony and Panasonic have both been experimenting with the production of 4k ultra-high-definition videos, which offer four times the resolution of a standard 1080p video. Yet in recent months, these high-quality digital videos have proven impractical for most internet users; they take up over 100GB of space. Worse yet, the game-changing movies can’t be published on Blu-ray discs, as they can only hold 50GB of storage. Consequently, the two firms decided it was time to create a platform that could handle their high-definition videos – and Blu-ray discs just didn’t have the memory capabilities.

“In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centres that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services,” the companies said in a joint statement.

The joint effort between the two firms highlights the hiccups both Sony and Panasonic have encountered trying to produce their own unique vision of the future of optical discs. Sony has already commercialised a special triple-layer Blu-ray disc capable of holding 100GB. Yet the disc is more or less meant for use with its professional broadcasting products only, as normal Blu-ray players can’t process that much data. More recently, Panasonic launched a dedicated magazine that harnesses the power of twelve 100GB optical discs at once. Both innovations were geared at a very specific professional audience; however, this latest venture will aim to engage a much wider market.

Whilst Sony was forced to compete heavily with other firms over dominance of the post-DVD market, the company is unlikely to face much competition in their latest endeavour. Tech firm Pioneer made headlines in 2008 for trying to commercialise a high-quality optical disc capable of holding 400GB of information. Yet somewhere along the way, the plans fell through. No prospective Blu-ray competitor has appeared since. Without any other prospective competition, Sony and Panasonic should have plenty of time to produce their next generation Blu-rays.

“Both Sony and Panasonic have a proven track record in developing Blu-ray disc format technologies,” Sony said. “By actively promoting the adoption of a new standard for next-generation high-capacity optical discs, they intend to offer solutions that preserve valuable data for future generations.”