Matsushita Electric Industrial’s newly appointed president on Friday expressed confidence that the company and its partners would win the battle for dominance in next-generation DVD players.
Fumio Otsubo, named on Thursday as head of the Japanese electronics giant behind the Panasonic brand, said he would uphold his predecessor’s policy of promoting the Blu-ray standard.
Supporters of the Blu-ray format, led by Matsushita and Sony, are waging a fierce battle against a rival HD DVD format pushed by Toshiba and NEC, with the two sides vying to set the common standard in the lucrative market.
The Blu-ray disc is expected to have a greater storage capacity than the HD DVD but also to be more expensive to make, at least in the short-term.
Otsubo said that the Blu-ray format was more suitable for the use of large, flat screen television sets, now a rapidly growing market.
“We are confident that when high-quality content is observed through a large display, a big storage capacity is a strong point,” Otubo told a news conference in Tokyo.
The newly appointed president said his firm would further step up its effort in development and production of both large flat television screens and Blu-ray DVD players.
“This is our winning scenario. I have strong confidence,” he said.
Otsubo also said the Blu-ray side had already won contracts with twice as many Hollywood filmmakers as those on the HD DVD standard.
“We will make steady headway, together with other Blu-ray Disc partners.”
The Hollywood studios pushed the Sony and Toshiba camps to settle their differences and develop a single format in an effort to avoid a replay of the VHS-Betamax war between two types of video cassette tapes in the late 1970s.
The two sides failed, however, to reach a deal and currently plan to push ahead with their separate technologies billed as offering cinematic quality images and opening up new possibilities of interactive entertainment. – AFP