With a huge industry support behind blue-laser disc technology I would say this will become the next step in optical storage after DVD, compare 4.7GB and 9.2GB (DVDs) versus 20+ gigs of capacity for an identically sized and shaped disc.

[COLOR=royalblue]Toshiba has developed a dual-layer rewritable optical disc for use with the blue-laser-based AOD (Advanced Optical Disc) format that it is developing with NEC.

The disc -- which will be introduced at the Optical Storage 2003 conference in Vancouver, Canada, next week -- is the same physical size as a CD or DVD and is capable of storing up to 36GB of data. It is one of two rewritable disc types that make up the initial AOD format proposal, the other being a single-sided disc capable of storing 20GB. The AOD format also includes 15GB and 30GB read-only disc types.[/COLOR]