Japanese tech firms, Sony and Panasonic, have announced the signing of a basic agreement that will see the two companies jointly developing a new standard for professional use next-generation optical discs. The companies aim to deliver an optical disc with the recording capacity of at least 300 GB by the end of 2015, which is around the same capacity delivered by twelve conventional PlayStation 3 Blu-ray discs.

According to Panasonic, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities in recent years, not only from the video production industry, including motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centres that handle increasingly large volumes of data. These will be the immediate main target market segments for the new optical discs, but consumer devices based on this new optical storage standard are also planned.  

Sony stated that optical discs sport many useful properties to protect the storage format against environmental damage. Amongst these properties are dust-and water-resistance, as well as the ability to withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored.

In addition, optical discs allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, which helps to ensure that data can continue to be read even as the format evolves, making the format a more robust medium for the long-term storage of content.

In related news, Corning is entering a new market segment via Gorilla Glass NBT, its new protective cover glass for notebooks that feature touchscreen displays.