Don’t get too excited about those 320GB discs touted by TDK yesterday. The Blu-ray Disc Association has no plans to allow their use as a video medium. Sure, TDK claims to have made their ten layer, 320GB Blu-ray discs in such a way that current Blu-ray players should have no trouble at all reading them. Of course consumers would love the opportunity to view an entire season of a show on one disc.
Before anyone gets too excited though, the Blu-ray disc association would like to have a few words. "I think there will be applications for larger capacity recordable discs, but it would be difficult for [discs larger than 50GB] to achieve compatibility with the installed base of players,” said SVP of communications Andy Parsons. “This is because player manufacturers design players to meet published specifications that define maximum media capacity, which in the case of Blu-ray Disc, is 50GB on two-layer media.”
He cites VHS as an example of a media that did the same thing. While later VCRs were compatible with a variety of play modes, these were almost exclusively used for home recordings. Tapes coming straight from the studios were almost always in the standard two-hour SP mode.
