Several years ago, there was news about holographic versatile disc (HVD), a new optical disc format that could potentially be the successor to blu-ray disc, just as blu-ray disc is the successor to DVD. Previous optical disc formats store data in the form of microscopic pits on the surface of the disc, but HVD stores data throughout the entire structure of the disc and also uses a different type of laser than what previous formats use, allowing for greater storage capacities; blu-ray discs can typically store from 25 to 50 gigabytes of data, but an HVD can store several hundred gigabytes, or even theoretically as much as several terabytes of data, making them very appealing for storing large amounts of data.
However, this format seems to have been largely forgotten, today, and never became popular, as it was expected to. Why is that? Is it too expensive to become widespread? Was it simply not able to compete with the rising popularity of flash memory and online streaming? What does everyone else here have to say on this subject?