With the entertainment industry showing an amazing amount of keenness in adopting HDTV, traditional storage media (DVDs and CDs) just can’t keep up with the requirements in terms of capacity; a 2-hour HDTV video can easily fill up a whopping 25GB of space. This is equivalent to roughly five times the capacity of a single layer DVD of today. Imagine having to keep five DVDs for each movie in your collection, and you will realize just how quickly that disc rack can fill up.

The solution to the problem is common sense, if you think about it – innovate something that offers more storage and the problem is instantly remedied. Clearly, the idea is simple but the implementation, as always, is riddled with its fair share of problems.

To begin with, the problem would not be too difficult if manufacturers could simply make bigger discs but that would be impractical as people wouldn’t like to go back to storing stuff on discs the size of LP records. Many of us would probably give up watching movies at home if we had to put up with clunky discs.

The solution is to some how pack more data inside a disc that is similar in size to standard DVDs. Of course, this in no way means that they will play on your same old DVD player but at least they would fit inside your CD racks. The remedies to this problem are varied from HD DVD to Forward Versatile Disc and whatnot; Blu-Ray is just one such solution from Sony, Matsushita, HP, Dell and a variety of other companies that are supporting this format.

The name "Blu-Ray" is a combination of "blue" for the color of the laser that is used inside the writers, and "ray" for optical ray. The "e" in "blue" was purposefully left off, as it’s illicit to trademark everyday words.

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