DVD Format Wars: Bad for Everyone?
LAS VEGAS — The drive to replace DVD technology with newer discs boasting greater storage capacity has come down to two major competing formats, and the coming marketplace battle will be bad for companies and users, the head of a major U.S. technology products retailer said Friday. “The damage the industry does to itself by not choosing a format is enormous,” said Brad Anderson, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Best Buy, one of the largest U.S. consumer electronics and appliances retail chains. “Two incompatible formats is as much a nightmare as you can make for consumers,” he added. The competing technologies are Blu-ray, the high-definition video disc format backed by Sony and several other major vendors, against HD-DVD, which is backed by the DVD Forum and companies including Toshiba, NEC, Intel, and Microsoft. The difference in storage space is huge: regular DVDs can hold 4.7GB of music, movies, and other data, while Blu-ray can carry 25GB of data and HD-DVD, 15GB. But
