GE's breakthrough -- 100 movies PER 5-inch disc!

General Discussions, Polls, Lists, Video Clips and Links
Post Reply
GeorgeC

GE's breakthrough -- 100 movies PER 5-inch disc!

Post by GeorgeC » April 27th, 2009, 7:29 am

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/techn ... globalhome

GE made a breakthrough with holographic technology.

The equivalent of 100 movies' worth of information can be put on one 5-inch optical disc!

This is far above even Blu ray's storage capacity.

The technology is still years away from being practical from consumer use -- even if the entertainment industry allows it to be marketed.

Don't count on Season sets and box sets like WB's Film Noir sets ever being marketed on single disc, though!

I could see applications for this technology in government, libraries, and research facilities where space is critical...

User avatar
AV Founder
AV Founder
Posts: 25294
Joined: October 22nd, 2004
Location: London, UK

Post by Ben » April 27th, 2009, 10:28 am

Wow, pretty impressive!

Two things: one, the other technoloigcal companies and studios might not like it that it's not "one of their own" that has developed thism, which could find it hard to be accepted in entertainment, at least until we're being urged to go from 1k to 2 or 4k in the home.

Secondly, if it is used, I could easily see these being used for franchise films or seasons. We already get two films on one disc, four films on two discs, and box set collections dedicated to a specific series or actor, so I could easily see the studios going for "The Clint Eastwood" collection on one disc. Likewise, imagine a ten disc set with all ten seasons of "Friends", for instance.

Instead of multi-disc sets for these, it would be one disc per season, so still a "boxed set" of ten discs, but with all of one season on one. Of course, standard def wouldn't really benefit apart from no need of being compressed, but this'll come in very handy for hi-def content in higher resolutions.

Cool breakthrough, in other words! :)

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » April 27th, 2009, 5:27 pm

It'll be years, if ever, before we see this on the consumer market.

The hardware companies are not in a mood to confuse the consumers more than they already are. This is like the supercomputers used to play grand chessmasters -- a neat gizmo, but not really practical for everyday use. It's just sort of a technology demonstrator to see how practical new technology is. It'd be horrifically expensive to market this thing as it is.

We all know Hollywood WON'T ever release an entire movie series on a single disc. That's just not the way they want to do business.

I'm of the opinion, barring a breakdown in the way things are going, that Blu ray will probably be the last major optical disc format... that is unless the price on the 5 inch disc stays low enough AND there are enough people that still want a hard copy of movies.

Piracy and a lot of tech-heads say otherwise. Downloads look like the future if the Internet pipeline ever gets practical enough for it and IF copy protection can be made that doesn't interfere in fair end-user rights but isn't as predictably easy as copy protection has been for 5-inch disc so far.

At any rate, I'm in general agreement that 5-inch disc will be around at least another 10-15 years.

The GE announcement is neat. However, in a year or two, someone will probably figure out how to fit 2,000 movies on a 5-inch disc!

AV Founder
AV Founder
Posts: 7261
Joined: October 23rd, 2004
Location: SaskaTOON, Canada

Post by Randall » April 27th, 2009, 10:25 pm

If storage space really mattered, we'd see studios putting season sets in SD on a Blu-ray disc. (Particularly shows that were only edited on video anyway.) But that's never happened either. No will to do so.

Post Reply