"The president of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd said on Thursday it is up to Toshiba Corp to yield its position in talks on a unified format for next-generation DVD technology, making clear that Matsushita and its partner Sony Corp won't budge," reports Reuters.
At the core of both formats are blue lasers, which have a shorter wavelength than the red lasers used in current DVD equipment, allowing discs to store data at the higher densities needed for high-definition movies and television.
Blu-ray discs have a memory layer only 0.1 mm from the surface while HD-DVD discs write data on a layer 0.6 mm from the surface, the same depth as the current generation of DVDs.
"There is still a chance to create a new format, but we will not waver on the 0.1 mm point," Nakamura said.
Comment: It's obviously very profitable to own a standard like this, because you can collect pots of money for licensing your technology plus a tax -- sorry, a royalty -- on every disc sold. Sony and Philips have been trousering the profits that come from owning the CD format for a couple of decades now, and no doubt will make many more millions in the future.
The catch is that lots of formats fail, and it becomes very unprofitable when consumers stop buying because of the resulting format wars. When the DVD format battle was fought behind closed doors, the two sides agreed a common format to avoid that risk.
Today, however, Sony and Matsushita must reckon they can win, and therefore have no need to compromise. In Sony's case, it helps to own some music and movie studios. Also, Sony can ship millions of Blu-ray drives by using it in its proprietary PlayStation 3 games console.
This is, of course, good capitalism, and you'd expect nothing less...
