Hybrid To Defuse DVD Format War?

September 28th, 2006: The battle between Sony’s Blu Ray and Toshiba HD-DVD next generation optical disc formats could be over before the two have even touched gloves, thanks to a breakthrough by Britain’s New Medium Enterprises.

The company has announced that it has figured out how to produce cheap, multi-layer discs that can support both formats, on one disc. For the film industry this means a movie can be stored in both formats on a single disc, appeasing consumer worries and reducing studio risks and overall costs.

While most talk is currently focussed on the film industry, where big bets are already being made with different studies lining up behind different technologies, the emergence of a device to unify the two opposing technologies could also make significant waves in the storage community.

Like the film industry, tech companies won’t have to gamble with one format, or sit back and wait for a winner to be declared before diving into the next generation.

New Medium Enterprises (NME) expects the first prototype to be available in early 2007, with a production price tag of .09 cents a disc, a mere 50 percent on top of conventional single-layer DVDs.

Aside from unifying the two formats, NME says that it has also cracked production line problems that have seen DVD producers discard large portions of their discs.

“Current technologies to create multiple layer disks mostly don't work,” NME Chief Technology Officer Eugene Levich told Reuters. “We've created a technology for mass production of multiple layers that does not suffer from the well known problem of low yields.”

The company has created discs with 10 different readable layers, and has also created its own player which it is willing to license, continued Levich. Regardless of whether it’s licensing the technology or not, NME isn’t going to necessarily win friends at Sony or Toshiba.

New Medium Enterprises was not immediately available for comment.

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