Threat of disc format war looms.....
<< split may also reflect concerns of Sony and Philips about the proposed division of royalties among companies responsible for DVD-Ram's development.>>
THURSDAY AUGUST 14 1997
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By Alice Rawsthorn in London and Michiyo Nakamoto in Tokyo
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The consumer electronics industry faces the threat of a format war following yesterday's announcement that Sony and Philips intend to adopt a different technology than rival manufacturers for DVD-Ram, the advanced computer discs.
Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest US computer equipment makers, also broke ranks from the consortium of 11 electronics and computing companies working on DVD development, by signalling its support for the format favoured by Sony and Philips.
DVD-Ram is one of the family of digital versatile discs which the industry regards as its most promising new products. It plans to market the discs as more sophisticated versions of video cassettes and CD-Roms. Unless the three companies agree to compromise, their version of DVD-Ram will be forced into direct competition against that of other consortium members, including Matsushita, Toshiba and Hitachi, the Japanese electronics groups.
A format war could jeopardise chances of orchestrating a smooth launch for DVD-Ram, just as the debut of the video cassette recorder was marred by the unsuccessful battle by Sony and Philips to establish Betamax as the industry standard against the VHS technology of their rivals.
DVD-Ram, due to go into limited production at the end of this year with a mass market launch scheduled for 1998, is the recordable version of DVD-Rom, the new discs which have higher memory capacity than CD-Rom and relay moving images as well as static ones.
Each DVD-Ram disc will be able to store an hour of film footage, meaning they will be too short to record feature films - a restriction Hollywood movie studios insisted on in the original DVD negotiations.
However, Sony claims that the technology proposed by the DVD consortium is less likely to appeal to consumers than the version it has developed with Philips, the Dutch group with which it produced the compact disc in the 1980s.
Sony said it still supported the consortium's other DVD-Ram technologies, but did not plan to put the DVD-Ram version into commercial production. Instead, it will manufacture its own format which, Sony claims, allows for easier compatibility with existing DVD-Rom drives, thereby making it cheaper to produce drives capable of accommodating DVD-Rom and DVD-Ram.
Mr Reinier Dobbelmann, industry analyst at SBC Warburg in Tokyo, said the split may also reflect concerns of Sony and Philips about the proposed division of royalties among companies responsible for DVD-Ram's development.
Analysts speculated that the industry may try to strike a compromise at next week's meeting of the European Computer Manufacturers Association in Kobe.
Demand for DVD-Video, the entertainment version of the new discs, which is positioned as a successor to the video cassette, has been reasonably strong in Japan and North America, the first markets where it has gone on sale. |
