It’s hard to imagine that Blu-ray has already been out for nearly a decade. After a two year war with Toshiba’s losing HD DVD, the Sony backed format would eventually become the victor, thanks in part to the PlayStation 3. With discs cable of holding 50GB, though a 400GB and 1TB were shown off years ago with little news on them since, it’s easy to see why the PS4 and Xbox One are using the medium to help bring HD games to your living room. Even with 50GB of space available on each Blu-ray disc, the industry and consumers to an extent are already running into a roadblock, especially if you consider 4K films which even at compressed rates can be around 300GB and uncompressed a whopping 3TB that the time for thinking of a new format medium has come. To that end, Sony and Panasonic are hoping to create a new 300GB optical disc.

The two companies hope that by putting their resources together, that they can have the new optical disc, capable of 300GB released by the end of 2015. It should be noted that despite a potential need for consumers, Sony and Panasonic are at first targeting corporate companies who want to have a long term storage solutions that are not reliant on cloud computing. Besides being useful to financial sectors that can store millions of documents, the new medium would also be of use to the film industry who can store their HD files and tuck them aside without worry of degradation.

After the format is introduced to the professional sector, the two companies hope that they can then trickle down the new medium to consumers and just in time for the PlayStation 5.

Discuss:

Do you think consumers need a larger optical format or are we too far into the Cloud path to need larger physical formats?

[Via Sony]