Fox joins Blu-ray group

[ibglowin]

20th Century Fox has joined a group developing one of two formats being promoted as a next-generation DVD technology.

Fox has joined the Blu-ray Disc Founders, who are working to establish Blu-ray as the follow on to DVD. Another group, called the HD DVD Promotion Group, is developing a competing format, called HD DVD. Both formats use blue lasers, as opposed to the red lasers used in DVD, but they're incompatible. Both also offer significantly more storage; Blu-ray offers 10 times the storage capacity of current DVD technology, and HD DVD also offers about six times as much.....

More here: http://news.com.com/Fox+joins+Blu-ray+group/2100-1041-5395449.html?part=dht&tag=ntop

[olgeezer]

Blue Ray is not backward compatable blue laser is. There is also a provision to read red laser HD movies in the blue laser specs which appeals to Time Warner. Blue Ray may win, and the consumer may lose

[Mike123abc]

Blu-Ray is backwards compatible. It just has 2 diodes on the pickup head, one for Blu-Ray the other for existing DVD/CD. It is not a big deal, it is a 10 cent (or less) part.

The key is that Blu-Ray and HDDVD are being developed by different groups of companies. Each group wants its new format to win so that they can collect the spoils. Right now it looks like Blu-Ray is winning. They have a lot more capacity (in theory up to 100gb with a 4 layer disk), and they have Sony and now Fox. Sony with the new aquisition of MGM now owns almost 45% of all movie titles ever produced... No studio has announced they are going with HDDVD yet.

I am sure that if both formats get started in the market there will of course be universal players eventually produced (like the DVD-R/DVD+R format war and the superbit/Audio DVD wars). They will come up with some funky pick up arm with a bunch of attachments on it to read anything and China will crank them out eventually for $50. The first few years could be a problem as incompatibility shows its evil head.

[olgeezer]

Blu-Ray is supported by the 6 biggies in electronics. This frightens the other manufacturers. (Sony, Panasonic, Tomson, Hitachi, and Samsung) Cost of both software and hardware is much more expensive (Time Warner estimates a billion dollars to start up new pressing facilities). Pre recorded Red laser discs would also be much less expensive to make. At this point politics will probably win, but so much is at stake and with the Big Gorilla (MS) in the wings, lower costs, earlier release, HDDVD may still have a chance