<rant>
I have a strong feeling that the MPAA, RIAA and other such organisations are trying to get us to a system where we store no media in our homes, but have a sufficiently-high-bandwidth connection to request, queue, download as a stream, view, and pay for, something …each time we want to watch it.
This is why there is consistent effort to “dissuade” any person or organization who promotes error-free copying, even legal copying, without restriction.
Examples: The delay of DAT which killed it as a consumer format in the late eighties, the introduction of SCMS in digital recorders after that, the introduction of “consumer audio” CD-Rs in consumer CD recorders, the zone locks or region codes in present-day DVD players, efforts to ban SCMS strippers, MP3 players, and that open-source Linux DVD player, the home DVD recorders that will not make DVDs that are compatible with consumer DVD players, and the computer DVD recorder in the new Mac that is not a “professional DVD Authoring” recorder and won’t make home DVDs that can be distributed and copied like movie-studio DVDs even if the creator expressly so wishes (and I wish I could find the cite for that)…
</rant>
On the other hand, there’s Fluorescent Multilayer Disc: theoretically 1 TB on a CD-sized disc.