The two, rival blue-laser optical storage formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, will not be coming together, Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi admitted yesterday.
Talks between the BD-backing Sony and HD DVD cheerleader Toshiba have ended, he said, in an interview with Nikkei Electronics.
Surprise, surprise. Comments from both parties during the period of the negotiations implied there was little chance of a compromise. To do so would require either party to abandon their preferred format.
Supporters of each format have, in the past, made it clear that physically the two formats are incompatible. The only way around the problem was to adopt one format's physical structure and add support for the other's data structure.
Sony had the edge here. Since BD is more capacious than HD DVD, with a more complex data structure, there was inevitably more scope to add HD DVD data compatibility to the BD spec than vice versa.
