Although the offices of IBM and Hewlett-Packard are nearby, Longmont, CO, is decidedly not Silicon Valley chic. But in this Denver suburb, a radical experiment in data storage is under way. At the headquarters of InPhase Technologies, where the conference rooms are named after ski resorts, chief executive Nelson Diaz holds up a clear plastic disc, about the size of a DVD but thicker, and pops it into a disc drive. A laptop connected to the drive downloads streaming video of an old episode of Seinfeld as the drive writes it to the disc.

But this is no ordinary recording process. The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content -- almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld -- and records it all in less than three hours.