Audio Video News

The first meeting of the new Blu-ray Disc Association, or BDA, a larger, more formally organized version of the original Blu-ray Disc Founders group, was held in Tokyo, Japan on October 4, 2004. It was formed to promote the Blu-ray format and finalize its technical standards.

The portion of the meeting open to the press began with a rundown of the organizational structure of the association, with its three major committees and multiple teams and groups. The Board of Directors includes Dell, HP, Hitachi, LGE, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK, and Thomson. The most important announcement, however, was that there are now a total of 73 companies active in the BDA (including the Board). BD, incidentally, appears to be the preferred nickname for Blu-ray, and this shortened version was used almost exclusively when referring the format during the meeting.

The new member that raised the most eyebrows was 20th Century Fox. Unfortunately, its membership was widely misreported as an indication that Fox had committed to releasing product on BD. But the Fox representative to the association, Michael O'Neill, indicated that Fox' participation is strictly to engage in a learning process, and they have not yet committed to putting out product either on BD or the rival HD-DVD format (Fox is also a member of the DVD Forum, which to date has thrown its weight behind HD-DVD). It's likely that Fox–like all the Hollywood studios–wants a foot in both camps to insure that their copy protection concerns are not compromised.

Questions from the floor inevitably addressed the likely format war between BD and HD-DVD, but there was no inkling of a possible pre-launch resolution of that potential debacle. The panelists emphasized the higher capacity of BD (25-50 GB for the ROM version, though an ultimate capacity of 100-200GB was claimed as a possibility), and the many promotional events that are planned for BD over the coming year.

While no one made any commitments, it seems likely that sometime in 2006 is the target for a possible worldwide launch. The two BD recorders that are currently available in Japan, from Sony and Panasonic, were not designed with the yet to be determined specifications for the pre-recorded version of BD (BD-ROM) , which means that they are unlikely to be compatible with any future BD movie discs.

A question on a possible consolidation between BD and HD-DVD appeared to be taken as an inquiry into the chance of some sort of universal player compatibility between the two formats. The respondent stated that consolidation was not physically possible given the current designs of the two formats, and no compatibility discussions are anticipated between the two camps.