Battle Brewing Over Successor to DVD

Two competing technologies which enable more than 20GB of data to be stored on each side of an optical disk are nearing commercialization, leading to fears that the industry could be split between support for one format or the other.

Toshiba and NEC have proposed their Advanced Optical Disc technology as a standard to the DVD Forum, a consortium of 212 companies. The forum is expected to settle on full specifications for AOD by the second quarter next year, said Hideyuki Irie, a DVD Forum official.

Earlier this year, the basic specifications for an alternative high-capacity standard known as Blu-Ray were announced by nine companies: Matsushita Electric Industrial, Royal Philips Electronics, Sony, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Pioneer, Samsung Electric, Sharp, and Thomson Multimedia.

Competing Standards

The AOD is based on a 405-nanometer-wavelength blue laser and can store up to 20GB of data on one side of a disc of the same size as a conventional DVD disc. AOD drives are expected to be commercially produced next year, according to Mitsumasa Fukumoto, an NEC spokesperson.

Blu-Ray, which also uses a 405-nanometer blue laser, can store up to 27GB of data on one side or 50GB on two sides, and is expected to be commercialized soon but no targeted launching date is set, Sony's Tsuyoshi Sakaguchi said.

High-capacity DVD drives are expected to be in demand in Japan once high-definition broadcasting begins next year. The 20GB capacity is large enough to record about two hours of high-definition video.

The industry is concerned about a battle between the AOD and Blu-Ray standards in future, according to Irie.

Coming Together

"The forum has been trying to merge the two formats into one standard and hasn't given up on doing so, but technically speaking, it is very difficult unless each side approaches and compromises with each other," Irie said.

However, the forum sees little possibility of those approaches being made, Irie said.

The same standards issue exists in the conventional 4.7GB DVD world.

DVD has three main formats--DVD-R/RW (DVD recordable/rewritable), DVD-RAM, and DVD+R/RW. The first two are backed up by the DVD Forum, which also supports DVD Multi, a standard to comply DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM. DVD+R/RW is supported by Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Chemical, Yamaha, and Ricoh.

Sony, which is also a DVD Forum member, recently unveiled a DVD-R/-RW/+R/+RW drive but not many companies from either side are planning to follow.