Up until now, the main method of adding capacity to optical discs is to decrease the track pitch as well as decrease the size of the pits to pack more on the disc.  Other companies have tried using holographic and multi-layer discs to vastly increase capacity.  However, the main drawback with each new development is that each requires new media, which means a hefty cost in creating new production lines to create the media as what Blu-ray has had to face.

Brainspark has developed a different method of increasing the capacity of media by exploiting the polarisation element used in the current DVD format, which is currently not being used for encoding data on the disc.  Their new method is called Polar High-definition DVD (PH-DVD) technology.  By utilising this, it is possible to increase both the capacity and transfer rate of existing red and blue laser media by up to three times.  For example, a dual-layer Blu-ray disc would have a potential capacity of over 100GB using PH-DVD technology.

As this technology would only involve creating new drives, this means that the technology could be brought to the market within a very short period and consumers will not have to worry about forking out on new expensive media.  However, it is unclear yet if they have any prototypes in development at this time, let alone a predicated launch period.

Source: SourceWire - Press