Cooperation casualty

Abstract

In August 2002, Toshiba and NEC presented a joint proposal to the members of a global video industry association. They proposed to replace the aging digital video disk (DVD) format with the advanced optical disk. There was overall agreement in the industry that the future of video players and recorders was in high definition.¹ The use of blue light laser made it possible to store a lot more data on this new format than on the old. Consequently, it provided much crisper pictures on the television screen. But the alliance between Toshiba and NEC was not the only contender in this promising market. A couple of years prior to this, Sony and Pioneer (another co-development alliance) had already demonstrated a digital video recorder based on the blue light laser. This other technology, branded “Blu-Ray”, offered much larger storage capacity (50 Gigabytes vs 30 for its rival), but it was also substantially more costly for manufacturers of devices to produce disk players or recorders as well as for film publishing companies to encode disks.