Since many days I was curious to know about long stand-off between Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards. Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives use a blue-violet laser with a wavelength of 405 nanometers, as compared to a red lasers 650 nanometers. This shorter wavelength light can be focused into a smaller spot, allowing engineers to cram more data within a given space. Together with tighter track density and other enhancements, the blue-laser capability boosts capacity far beyond 4.7-gigabytes of a conventional DVD.Blu-ray stores more information than traditional DVDs and has more storage capacity than HD DVD (50 GB vs. 30 GB on a dual-layer disc).
Recently, the Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) has created a taskforce to ease the “integration of 3D technology into the Blu-ray Disc format”. Its ultimate aim is to define a standard for stereoscopic 3D content on a Blu-ray Disc, but nothing’s yet been mentioned about how this will be achieved or when such a standard could come into force. The BDA claimed that the format is “the ideal platform for bringing 3D technology to mainstream home entertainment”, thanks chiefly to its “flexibility and incomparable picture quality”. Its storage capacity will help too, we'd say. Executives from the film industry, and from the consumer electronics and IT sectors, will make up the taskforce. Blue-ray 3D films sold with cardboard red and blue glasses are already available. But it’s possible that the BDA taskforce will look towards higher quality options when defining the standard, such as shutter glasses
While reading these recent reports in the month of May and June; hours after a interaction with Mr. Hirotsune Akamatsu, General Manager, Enginnering Planning Division of Toshiba, I am eager to share with you the 'Technology Management' approaches adopted by Toshiba as one of the leading representative of huge Digital Media Network Industry of Japan. In Feb 2008 it was clear that High Definition DVD will represent one of the quickest ever option for competing formats and may effectively hand the entire HD movie format war to chief opponent of Toshiba, Blu-ray. The rapid fall began with movie studio Warner Bros.' plan to drop HD DVD just before the Consumer Electronics Show in January 08, which handed a clear majority of HD movies to Blu-ray and forced the HD DVD Promotional Group to cancel its keynote presentation for the event. The shift led to a sustained marketshare lead for Blu-ray almost immediately afterwards and spurred several independent studios to echo Warner's Blu-ray only policy.
In this context Mr.Hirotsune was analysing the formation of DVD Consortium in 1996. He talked about Patent Portfolio of Toshiba, Consortium of DVD manufactureres in Japan which was founded to avoid the conflict of different standards and the mechanism of commercialisation of specific technology with the help of institutionalised mechanism which is run by the force of mutual interests of different partner companies in the same industry.This consortium has three main divisions of operation. One at Policy level, other at Legal level and third at Technological level.
Among the core constituents of the Consortium, Policy group consisting of different Corporate Managers are responsible to define and initiate future strategy for entering in new technology areas. Legal team takes care about having common approach towards avoiding Anti-Trust cases consuming the huge time and tremendous cost of the partner industires and also IPR and compliance isssues. Technology group tries to address the benchmarks, standards and compatibility issues by envisioning possible conflict and technological viabilities. Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) works under the Task Force and Secretary Office followed by deputy offices of Joint Technical Committe, Compliance Committe and Promotion Committe.
The "Blu-ray Disc Founder group" was started in May 20, 2002 by nine leading electronic companies: Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung[2]. In order to enable more companies to participate on May 18, 2004, it announced that Blu-ray Disc Founders will shift to Blu-ray Disc Association in October. Blu-ray Disc Association It was inaugurated on October 4, 2004 by 14 companies of Board of Directors which added 20th Century Fox to the 13 above-mentioned companies, Contributors of 22 companies, General members of 37 companies, and a total of 73 companies.
Currently Toshiba founding member of HD-DVD Consortium, along with few companies is pitted against large alliance lead by Sony who are following Blue Ray for development of coming technological innovation of 3D TV. This fight for marketplace is interesting to watch for. Tohsiba looks way ahead comapred to efforts of other competitors in development of 3D Tv while Sony in gaming consoles powered by their '3Play Station' version, Toshiba claims that they are in the process of developing 4000* 2000 Pixel resolution having 60 frames per second. It appears that Sony with their 3PS gaming system will have lead in the market of 3D Animation but Toshiba`s strength in downloadable and sharing platfomr may outdo Sony in maintaing their market.This is due the fact that Sony is struggling to increase the customer base for PS3.
Unfortunately, Blu-ray does not offer much for games. The extra storage capacity is not needed since Xbox 360 games come on traditional DVDs. The PS3 Blu-ray drive also has a slower read speed than a standard DVD drive, causing longer game load times. Furthermore, there are less than 300 movies currently out in the Blu-ray format. If Sony wants the PS3 to succeed with Blu-ray, it must capitalize on Blu-ray content.
A study of 2009 by 'Competitive Strategy of California Institute of Technology' says that "Console gaming is currently entering a new generation with the introduction of the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3), Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. Sony, with its PlayStation 2, was the market leader in the previous generation with an estimated share of 70%, while Microsoft and Nintendo split the rest of the market. However, Sony is in danger of losing market share with the PS3, mainly due to the PS3’s significantly higher cost.If you are interested in details please click this link (http://www.mcafee.cc/Classes/BEM106/Papers/2007/sonyps3.pdf)
Annex:
What is the ongoing development in Blue Ray Research:(Source: Wickipedia)
Although the Blu-ray Disc specification has been finalized, engineers continue working to advance the technology. Quad-layer (100 GB) discs have been demonstrated on a drive with modified optics (TDK version) and standard unaltered optics ("Hitachi used a standard drive.")In August 2006, TDK announced that they have created a working experimental Blu-ray Disc capable of holding 200 GB of data on a single side, using six 33 GB data layers.
In January 2007, Hitachi showcased a 100 GB Blu-ray Disc, which consists of four layers containing 25 GB each. Unlike TDK and Panasonic's 100 GB discs, they claim this disc is readable on standard Blu-ray Disc drives that are currently in circulation, and it is believed that a firmware update is the only requirement to make it readable to current players and drives.
In December 2008, Pioneer Corporation unveiled a 400 GB Blu-ray Disc, which contains 16 data layers, 25 GB each, and will be compatible with current players after a firmware update. A planned launch is in the 2009-2010 time frame for ROM and 2010-2013 for rewritable discs. Ongoing development is under way to create a 1 TB Blu-ray Disc as soon as 2013.
At CES 2009 Panasonic unveiled the DMP-B15, the first portable Blu-ray Disc player and Sharp introduced the LC-BD60U and LC-BD80U series, the first LCD HDTVs with integrated Blu-ray Disc players. Sharp has also announced that they will sell HDTVs with integrated Blu-ray Disc recorders in the United States by the end of 2009.
As of April 2008, a joint licensing agreement for Blu-ray Disc has not yet been finalized. A joint licensing agreement would make it easier for companies to get a license for Blu-ray Disc without having to go to each individual company that owns a Blu-ray Disc patent. For this reason a joint licensing agreement was eventually made for DVD by the DVD6C Licensing Agency.
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