On Monday October 4, Twentieth Century Fox Film became the 14th member of the Blu-Ray disc Association (BDA). With mega-movie titles under their belt, such as Star Wars and Titanic, Fox is definitely a step in the right direction to aid Sony’s Blu-Ray technology in the DVD battle against its rivals, Toshiba’s and NEC’s HD-DVD. The winner of this war, which could go either way, will be deciding what the standard HD format for DVD should be.

All this talk about Fox jumping on the Blu Ray bandwagon is somewhat misleading though.Yes Fox has joined the Blu Ray disc Association (BDA) to support, study, and promote the devolpment of Blu Ray format and develop copyright technologies to protect the discs, but it seems like Fox is still playing the field. According to Fox technology Group’s special advisor Michael O’Neill, Fox is not ready to commit any of their content to the Blu-Ray format at this time. “We are also exploring the HD format, as we have been for a year, and we are going to evaluate both formats in a positive, collaborative fashion,” stated O’Neill on Monday, before the inaugural meeting of the BDA began. Other players in the association include Sony (of course), Samsung, Phillips, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sharp, and Hitachi.

So far it seems that Fox is the only film studio that is supporting Blu-Ray. On the HD-DVD side, Japan’s largest movie distributor has signed a deal to begin releasing movies in HD-DVD by late 2005. This is about the same time that Sony is preparing to launch their Blu-Ray line of players/recorders and DVDs. No U.S studios have stated when they will release DVDs in the new format or even which format it will be, though.

Michael.G

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2004 at 12:32 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.