On Monday, March 10th 2014, Sony and Panasonic announced that they will be teaming up to develop and then release the next generation of optical media. They are calling the new media the Archival Disc. It will basically be the same size as a Blu Ray disc, but it will be readable for 50 years.
Sony and Panasonic will work on the disc together but plan to release the new disc separately in 2015. The first discs will have a capacity of 300 GB, with 500 GB and 1 TB discs to follow later. Current Blu Ray disc capacity is 25 GB.
The two companies expect to achieve the increased capacity by giving the discs three layers on each side and by making uses of multilevel recording technologies. Sony and Panasonic are aiming for the professional market for application, such as film and music recording. They also believe that the disc will be most suitable for Cloud storage.
The discs will not need any special storage considerations and will be free from temperature and humidity concerns. It's 50 year lifetime is longer then most hard drives currently in use, and it will be more durable then magnetic tape storage cartridges.
Sony and Panasonic are not currently considering the Archival Disc for home or consumer use, however, with enough consumer interest, who knows what the future may hold.
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