Sony is making noises that its support for the Blu-Ray next-generation DVD format may not preclude reaching some sort of compromise with its HD-DVD competitors:
“Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing, and we haven’t totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise,” Ryoji Chubachi, Sony’s president-elect, said at a news conference today in which he discussed the company’s performance and future strategy.
[…] HD-DVD backers, which include NEC Corp. and Toshiba Corp., say HD-DVDs can be produced for about the same price as DVDs and are backward-compatible with DVDs and CDs, making the format more convenient for both consumers and the industry. HD-DVD movie titles, PC drives and players are all due out by the end of the year.
Sony has steadfastly promoted Blu-ray as a technology that has greater capacity, saying this makes the format more useful because more content can be stored on a disc. The technology also has wider support in the technology industry, although release dates for movie titles have not yet been announced.
Chubachi’s comments mark the second time that a Sony executive has signaled the possibility of a compromise between the two camps. In January, Ken Kutaragi, executive deputy president of Sony, said a format war wasn’t in the public interest and that Sony hadn’t ruled out the possibility of uniting the formats.
Indeed it is not in the public interest — and, further, is the thing most likely to keep folks from investing in either technology. Folks have become a lot more sensitized to standards issues than they were in the Beta-vs-VHS days (and to some degree because of that), and are less willing to pony up for a machine that will be only useful for some title and not for others.
And Sony has not been exactly the most successful in promoting alternative formats and technologies, even though its offerings — from Betamax to Mini-discs — have been technologically spiffy.
If they can come up with a compromise on this, everyone will be muuuuuch happier.