Well, not quite. However, Panasonic are claiming to have developed a tellurium suboxide palladium-doped phase-change recording film with a very high transmittance and crystallization rate.

Or put another way, this Te-O-Pd process enables four 25Gb layers to be used without any loss of data quality and Panasonic reckons that will equate to a century of storage for your data on these Blu-ray discs. The original Panasonic paper reporting on the process even mentions a smaller 50Gb disc that will last for a claimed 500 years. If that was not good enough, they have iced this particular technology cake with a footnote that Te-O-Pd id inorganic and not particularly soluble so as to prevent release of toxins into the environment when they are dumped in years to come.

The trouble is, as pretty anyone who has had an interest in IT for longer than a year will appreciate, that the chances of Blu-ray still being a storage medium in 100 years, or 10 years for that matter, is pretty remote. So why bother with this process and why make such a fuss about it. Anyone recall the rapid rise and fall of Zip discs for example? Crikey, anyone even remember Zip discs now, or Jaz or Clik or, well you get the picture. And this before we even start to examine the accuracy of the longevity claims, which is difficult as the discs are not in production yet.

However, I can certainly point to the past and recall the salty aftertaste of the ‘decades of data storage’ claims made for CDs which turned out to be nowhere near that unless you happen to exist within the same sterile lab environment as the chap who did the testing that is.

Oh, and who is to say that Blu-ray players will be around in 100 years, seeing as that format battle is far from won. Can I interest anyone in some movies on Betamax tape?

The shocking truth of the matter is that there remains only one truly long term storage medium that has stood the test of time and shows no signs of failure: and that, my friends, is good old fashioned paper...