Guess what? Another kind of super capacity media has been announced - and this time it's an Australian invention. The claim is that the capacity will be enough for 2000 DVDs. Awesome news. It's touted to be going into production in the next five years so it's going to be another wait and see kind of thing. 

This new product uses nano technology with data written in various polarisations. In other words, when the read laser is polarised at zero degrees rotation, there is one batch of data visible. Another batch at ninety degree and so forth. To explain it as simply as I can, it's vaguely similar to the old quadrature ampliteude modulation (QAM) encoding used in modems to achieve v32bis and Trailbalzer speeds, except this is being achieved in an optical environment, in three dimensions, plus altered optical dimensions. Pretty neat, eh?

Here's where it gets sticky: How much will it cost to make each disc at commercial volumes? The cost of gold nanorods isn't cheap at al, not to mention the expense of tech required to get one disc out every five to ten seconds as is normal in replication of optical media (speed depends on the kind of replication line, subtleties of the process which differ per machine type, etc). It goes much further than that as anyone who may have been involved in optical media manufacture would well know - far beyond the scope of this commentary. 

There's one really exciting upside to this: it makes one realise how incredibly low cost DVD and CD are.

CD and DVD replication has become commoditised to some extent. The manufacturing process is mature, reliable and repeatable. The cost per unit has fallen massively since initial release to the market and now represent an unbeatable marketing medium. It's simple to use, everyone knows what it is when they receive it and they're willing to listen to the audio, watch the presentation, play the game and receive your message. Fabulous!

Here's the link for the easy to read version: http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/articles/2009/05/21/1242498857369.html

And here's the link for the orignal article which is more scientifically oriented: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/full/nature08053.html

Update: 27 May 2009 from One to One Magazine - the journal of the media replication industry: http://oto-online.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1438&Itemid=1