Reports from Japans’s Kyodo News agency indicate talks aimed at producing a unified next-generation DVD format have broken down between consumer electronics giants Sony and Toshiba. Toshiba heads a group of companies supporting proposed "HD-DVD" technology, while Sony heads up a bloc supporting a competing "Blu-Ray" standard. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standards were developed independently to increase the storage capacity of DVD discs, but are incompatible; Blu-Ray discs hold up to 25 GB of data but are more complex and expensive to produce than the 15 GB HD-DVD format. Discussions between the companies began earlier in an effort to unify the formats and avoid confusion in the consumer marketplace.
Toshiba’s decision to exit the discussions may stem from a simple need to get to market: they’ve simply run out of time to settle on a disc format if they’re going to meet their goals of having next-generation DVD players on the market by the end of 2005. Toshiba’s hand my have been forced by Sony’s announcement that it will be including Blu-Ray players in its forthcoming Playstation 3 video game console, which, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the market leader, will almost certainly sell a very large number of units.
According to Kyodo, electronics company Matsushita, a member of Sony’s bloc, also decided to abandon negotiations on a unified format to push ahead with Blu-Ray products.
For Rob Enderle’s analysis of the situation for Designtechnica, see his Talkback column "Blu-Ray Wins or Nothing Does" published August 8, 2005.
