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Quarter-sized CD's?

Posted by michael on from the little-disc-big-restrictions dept.

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.

2 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:sell licenses by maggard · · Score: 5, Informative
    The reason minidisks never tookoff is because Sony refused to sell licenses. Same reason Beta lost to VHS.

    Beta lost to VHS for a number of reasons, over-simplifying it to licensing is so innacurate as to be incorrect.

    • Beta VCRs cost more to produce
    • Beta tapes cost more to produce
    • VHS was able to record longer programs
    • VHS was able to record longer programs (this was really important)
    • Actual quality wasn't all that different for most folks

    Licensing and single-sourcing was just one more problem.

    --
    I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
  2. about Son'y minidiscs by unformed · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sony's minidiscs never took off

    Wrong. Sony's minidiscs never took off for the intended audience.

    Minidiscs are the defacto standard medium for amateur bootleggers (for concerts, etc), since they're cheap, small, and have good quality. The best are DAT recorders, but they're expensive and big.

    Just some FYI.