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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.

6 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Gotta love the picture caption by morcheeba · · Score: 5, Funny

    Steve Volk founded DataPlay in November 1998 out of his frustration with the multiple storage formats used in consumer electronics.

    So his solution? Invent another storage format!

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  2. Not true about MD not taking off... by Kaneda · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For some reason, MD didn't take off in a big way in the US, but in Japan and Europe, they are a huge success. In the UK you can buy pre-recorded minidiscs in the music stores, like CD's or vinyl.
    Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player. They have totally replaced tapes and the walkman over here.
    Just because the US seems to have ignored them for the last 5 years does not make them a failure...

  3. Damn alien technology by rsteele19 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I guess this means I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again...

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  4. 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.

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  5. 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.

  6. It'll die by Dolly_Llama · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Please forgive the marketroid speak but,

    Any new format, to succeed needs to add value to the user to overcome the cost of changing over. With CDs, there was a marked increase of quality over vinyl. Some might argue it was a decrease, but Joe Sixpack is still glad his CDs dont pop and scratch. Further, the CD allowed instant track access at the push of a button. It was these two features which pushed the changeover to CDs, along with the gradually decreasing price of players and concurrent larger selection of CDs in stores.

    That said, where are the additional values of this medium over CDs? It's small. neat. But if I have to give up my CD burner, small dont mean much.

    The next medium is most likely to be some flavor of mp3 or ogg device, be it solid state or magnetic disc based. Give me the ability to carry all the music I've bought over the last 15 years in my pocket, and the ability to navigate easily among all the songs, and I'll be all over it.

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