Sony, Toshiba give up on unified DVD format -paper

[Soham]

TOKYO (Reuters) - Groups headed by Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp. offering competing technologies for next-generation DVDs have given up efforts to develop a unified format, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Tuesday.

For three years, the two groups have pushed to have their respective standards adopted to gain dominance in the multibillion-dollar markets for DVD players, PC drives and optical discs.

Toshiba, along with NEC Corp. and Sanyo Electric Co., has been promoting HD DVD, while Sony and Matsu****a Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic brand products, have been developing a technology known as Blu-ray.

The two groups have held negotiations on unifying their formats to persuade consumers to shift to advanced discs and to promote growth in the industry.

But negotiations fell through as neither side yielded, and time ran out to develop a format before the launch of new products from both groups, the paper said.

"Late August is the practical time limit (to unify formats)," Yoshihide Fujii, Toshiba's corporate senior vice president, was quoted as saying in the paper.

A Toshiba spokeswoman said Fujii just meant that the company needed to start developing software by late August for its HD DVD-based players.

A senior Toshiba official told Reuters in London that shipments of HD-DVD products would start early next year.

"As a product, in the first quarter of 2006," Toshiba's corporate vice president, Nobuhiro Yoshida, said when asked when Toshiba would ship HD-DVD items.

A Sony spokesman said it had become harder to unify formats after a failure to reach an agreement in negotiations in May.

Both companies agreed, however, that a unified format is still a possibility. They said a single format would be the best way, and added they would release their products as scheduled.

Sony plans to put a Blu-ray disc drive in its new PlayStation game console next year.

Sony's Blu-ray technology is also backed by Dell Inc. and South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co..

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 higher densities needed for high-definition movies and television.

Toshiba's then president, Tadashi Okamura, said in May that producers of next-generation optical discs would eventually use one format, although products based on the two competing standards may be around for a limited time.

Shares in Toshiba closed 1.9 percent higher on Tuesday at 440 yen, while Sony stock closed up 0.3 percent at 3,740 yen. The Nikkei average ended 0.2 percent higher.

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