DVD Forum approves twin rewriteable HD DVD formats

Yeah, I’ve been seeing stuff on holographic storage and how it is the Next Big Thing for maybe 10 years now. Back in the mid-90s (96ish) there was a company that made a splash, something like C3D? – I forget now, and had a website with illustrations of the standard 120mm disc storing terrabytes, talk of 10s of layers, etc. As well as a business card sized static media which you could just slot into a reader. It didn’t turn, it was scanned by the lasers, and was supposed to hold many GB. They were perpetually perfecting their system, and then they went away. The website shut down and all.

Now there are other companies making the same claims. It seems that they’re farther along than in the past, and I do believe that it will probably be the way of the future, but I’m not sure what the practical use will be. Flash memory prices continue to drop as use increases. The same with magnetic storage, especially with the new perpendicular drives. And with Blu-ray already demonstrating capacity of 200GB in the lab, I don’t know that another system with higher density is really needed. Sure you might be able to put the entire run of MASH in HD on one holodisc, but you need to sell things based on the value of the content, and commercial people balk at paying hundreds of dollars for one disc – no matter what’s on it. While they’ll pay the same, or more, for the same content on multiple volumes. Easier to convince yourself to spend $500 spread out over 10 purchases of $50, than to drop $500 at once. Not necessarily logical, but neither are humans.

I could see it making a good data back up system for servers. There has long been a gap between the capacity of back-up media and the dramatic growth in hard drive capacity. Sony already commercialized a higher-density blue laser system (based on the same tech as Blu-ray, but not compatible – higher density, data-only) for data backup, but even that needs several discs to do one full backup of a large drive.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I tend to think Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) is the last generation of commercial media. Blu-ray has growth potential to last a while. After that I think we’ll probably see most things purchased via downloads, and entertainment appliances with RAID arrays for data security, and probably Blu-ray burners for making physical copies, etc. It is hard to see what would need more than, say, 200GB for a video disc. That’s several times what you’d need even for a 1080p HD version of a film with basically no compression. Maybe if they ever get holographic displays working commercially, then we’ll need more capacity for holofilms.

I won’t hold the root kit crap (and I do think that’s a serious issue) against Sony as a whole. Huge corporations like that operate like a bunch of individual groups flying in formation. Sony Music has been at odds with Sony computer and electronics over DRM and other issues. Sony’s electronics side would love to not deal with DRM – sell jukeboxes, ripping tools, etc. Sony Music would like to trap everything with DRM and lock it down.

There has been a kind of shake-up within Sony. Sony Music had been winning the fight, and all of Sony’s digital music products had been locked down – their first units only supported Sony’s codec, ATRAC. But since Apple dominated the market and made Sony an also-ran in the market they created (portable music), the power within Sony shifted somewhat and they started opening things up more – supporting MP3 on newer players, and open MPEG4 video and AAC audio on the PSP, etc. Being too restrictive with their formats is blamed for Sony failing to gain market share.

This screw-up with DRM seems to be lack of communication. Sony combined their music operation with BMG and it seems like the DRM crap came in the door from the BMG side. But Sony didn’t handle damage control very well. It took them too long to figure out what was going on and deal with it.