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New 100GB Optical Disk From Taiwan
Alt173 points to this article from Taiwan Economic News , excerpting: "The National Science Council (NSC) said Sunday that a local research team has successfully developed a new optical disc that can hold more than 100 gigabytes of information.
The research team was led by professor Tsai Ding-ping of National Taiwan University. The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
By using "near-field" optical technology, the 100-gigabyte disc stores more than any other similar product in the world. The super-sized disc will be used at home to store large movie or music files, according to Tsai.
The near-field optical technology also allows the bits of information on a disc to be spaced closer together to increase the disc's storage capacity."
Commented today, "This is it. We're done. This will kill the movie and music industry just like the VHS tape, CD and DVD."
Senator Hollings responded, "We're asking China to invade Tawain today to stop this evil horde from joining the axis of evil."
Great. Now instead of an album costing $15.00, and containing one hit and 14 filler songs, the CD will cost $1,500.00 and contain one hit and 1499 filler songs.
The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
What he forgot to mention was that, at present, the disc is roughly the size and thickness of a small kitchen table.
Lots of talk here about how this could be the "ultimate bootlegging product." On the other hand, if the movie industry is smart, this could be the "ultimate bootleg killer."
The movie studios are very nervous about internet piracy, but there's a good reason why the vast majority see movies in theatres and rent or purchase DVDs instead of acquiring bootleg VCDs. The simple truth is that low bitrate videos suck. They have motion artifacts. They have substandard audio.
They don't meet our quality expectations. A DVD is vastly superior. So is a 35mm print in a theatre. That's why Spiderman and Clones made over a hundred million dollars each in their first weekends, in spite of the fact that vastly inferior bootlegs were available "for free" on the internet.
As the electronics industry begins to retool their equipment from CDR manufacture to DVD-R manufacture, the movie industry is going to run into the same problem as the music industry -- they are going to be selling a $15.00 product that can be trivially copied perfectly onto a $1.00 piece of media. Over the next decade or so, as internet bandwidth increases, we will begin to see file-sharing of actual DVD images.
How can the movie industry make file-sharing of DVD images undesirable?
The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.
Such a technology, available for the home, would quickly relegate DVD-quality recordings into the "low end" of video, at the same time that the price barrier on DVD-recording equipment falls through the cellar.
The industry should also realize that copy protection is worthless. It will always be broken, and the longer it goes unbroken, the more severe the market effect once it is broken. The real solution to the piracy problem of inferior bootleg recordings is the age-old tactic of the salesman. Offer a vastly better product, and your customers will follow.
I think it's hilarious how you could substitute a few words in your post above, to be having the same problem seven years ago.
80 Gig HD --> 2 Gig HD
writeable DVD --> CDR
100 CD-RW's --> 100 floppies
Until writable CD's come along, there isn't even a usable, cheap way to do a backup of my 2 Gig hard disk as it is. Right now, it'd take a stack of 100 floppies to do it, and about a year or so. It seems the only practical solution is to buy two (or more) identical hard disks...
Am I the only one that finds the comparisons to CD burners a bit lacking in perspective? For one thing, its not like they are taking a current CD and stacking it vertically until it can hold 100GB. Instead, they're going to increase the density and add a few layers to it. More density = more bits per disc rotation. A 24x CD Burner would burn 3.6MB a second, but a DVD at the same rotation would be like 3.6MB x 8 because the density is higher.
What Im saying is that a single layer version of one of these disks would get filled just as quickly as itd take to fill a CD (huge leap in the amount of data, though...), it might take twice as long if it has 2 layers.. and so on. Who knows, it depends on how the burning technology works.
My point is that the data rate of a CD is going to be incredibly slow compared to the data rate of one of these disks as long as the data density is higher. So stop comparing it to CD Burners. It is sort of like saying that an airplane would be many times slower than a car because it's so much heavier.
"Derp de derp."