Sony and Panasonic have announced that they are working together to develop the next generation optical discs. These discs will be capable of holding 300GB of data, which is considerably higher than 50GB that a dual-layer Blu-Ray can hold at the moment, which can be read by standard players and hardware. Both companies believe that the discs will be ready for use by the end of 2015.

“Both companies have previously developed products based on the Blu-ray™ format, leveraging the strengths of optical discs. However, both Sony and Panasonic recognized that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage in years to come given the expected future growth in the archive market, and responded by formulating this agreement.” While both companies didn’t mention 4K, it is easy to visualize these discs being used as the evolution of the good old Blu-Ray discs, and will be capable of holding a 4K movie. Sony, on its part, has been pushing 4K hardware – UHD TVs, media players and even projectors.