Efforts by Japanese electronics giants to agree on a common standard for the next-generation DVDs have so far failed, a top industry official said Thursday, heightening chances consumers will be forced to choose between incompatible formats.
Kunio Nakamura, president of Matsushita Electric Industry, said talks "have essentially resulted in a piece of blank paper."
Matsushita, which makes the Panasonic brand, is with Sony in leading a group of firms to promote the Blu-ray standard of the next generation DVDs, while Toshiba and NEC have pushed the rival HD DVD standard.
Toshiba's negotiator also said this week that talks had proven difficult on setting a standard for the new DVDs, which are set for mass-market release later this year.
The next-generation DVDs are billed as offering cinematic quality images and opening up new possibilities of interactive entertainment.
After three years of fighting, the two sides agreed last month to study compatibility to prevent a scenario in which Sony discs do not work on Toshiba players or vice versa.
Matsushita said the gap between the two camps has remained wide.
"The thinking of Matsushita and Sony has not changed. We are waiting for the other side's response," Nakamura said.
"The negotiations have not broken down. We only returned to the situation before the negotiation started," he said, as quoted by the Asahi Shimbun daily's Web site.
The Blu-ray disc is expected to have a greater storage capacity but also be more expensive to make, at least in the short term, as the format has greater differences from current-generation DVDs.
Among the Hollywood studios, Walt Disney and Sony Pictures Entertainment back Blu-ray, while HD DVD supporters include Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers Studios.
Supporters of the Blu-ray technology also include Apple Computer, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Samsung Electronics.
The technology war is seen as similar to the one that erupted in the late 1970s when home videocassette players hit the market. By the 1980s, customers who had gambled on the Sony-developed Betamax system had to switch to VHS, which became the standard.
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