The Sony Corp. and Panasonic led Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) welcomed Apple Computer Inc. to its board of directors on Thursday. The Blu-ray Disc format now seems more certain of being accepted as the future standard for storing High Definition movies, photos and other digital content.
Few other companies have done as much as Apple in driving consumer adoption of DVD authoring during the last four years. They were one of the first PC makers to offer a way to record DVDs on computers with the Super Drive, the industry’s first high-volume CD and DVD burning drive and its revolutionary iDVD and DVD Studio Pro software applications.
Apple’s support has turned the odds against the HD DVD format developed by Toshiba Corp, NEC Corp and other companies. The Blu-ray Disc format now seems almost certain to become the major technological standard for next-generation DVDs.
The objective behind setting up BDA was to create a support base for Blu-ray Disc—the next generation optical disc for storing High Definition movies, photos and other digital content.
Blu-ray is so named as it refers to the blue-violet laser used to read from and record to the new format DVD. Current optical disc technologies such as DVDs and CDs work with a red laser.
A spokesman for the BDA said the Blue-ray disc’s capacity will be five times larger than today's DVD’s. A single-layer Blu-ray Disc can hold up to 25 gigabytes of data and a double-layer Blu-ray Disc can hold up to 50 gigabytes of data. Current DVDs have a limited capacity of 4.7 gigabytes on single-layer discs and 8.5 gigabytes on dual-layer discs.
Besides Sony and Matsushita, the Blu-ray's backers include Round Rock, Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Walt Disney Co., Thomson, (the world's largest supplier of recorded DVDs), Hitachi, Ltd.; LG Electronics Inc.; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Pioneer Corporation; Royal Philips Electronics; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sharp Corporation; TDK Corporation; Thomson; Twentieth Century Fox; and Walt Disney Pictures and Television.
With Apple backing the Blu-ray DVD format, Sony seems more likely now to dominate the $26.1-billion U.S. market for DVDs and players.
