Petabyte on a disc? ... Yup, sure can.

[quintessentone]

Check this out!  When the book had been closed on the inevitable demise of physical media, I at least, had believed that this angle of development might have gone the way of the dinosaur... then this article jumped out a me.  (Thank goodness for material sciences.)

From TechXplore: A DVD-sized disk that can store 1 million movies
 

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A team of photonic engineers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a new type of optical DVD that is capable of holding up to a petabyte of data. The group used a new material to coat the DVDs and new laser techniques to write data. The results are published in Nature.

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Interestingly, it was a matter of using new material coating and new lasers.  
 

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The type of DVDs currently used to hold movies and data have a capacity of 4.5 gigabytes—enough to store approximately two hours of video. Data is written using a laser to etch a series of zeros and ones onto its surface. In this new effort, the team in China found a way to store significantly more data on a DVD using an entirely new approach.
 
Their new method involves storing data in 3D instead of as a single layer. The team found they were able to store data on a single disk with up to 100 layers. To create multiple layers on a disk, the team developed a special coating and then developed a way to etch the individual layers using special patterns of light and a dye in the coating that allowed for etching at the nanoparticle scale. This allowed them to store data at an unprecedented level.

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Well... unless Big Tech squashes this, they will have to endure a radical change in the market.  They usually don't like that.   I hope this makes for a real change in the way that market exploitation keeps benefits of new tech away from consumers until they can monopolize the market. 

I predict "opportunity lost" as the outcome.
Or is this maybe propaganda? 
Or am I wrong for even considering that?

Illustration:  https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/202...k-that.jpg

This is fantastic, if true.

Sadly, I think you are correct that advancements always seem to be stifled because quick progress tend to lose people their jobs and dinosaur companies may go under.