Next Generation DVD Talks Falter

Talks between Toshiba and Sony over the next generation of DVDs stalled over the weekend according to several news sources. The companies plan to try again in the coming days to see if a compromise can be reached to head off a possible costly format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

Toshiba is pointing fingers at Sony, claiming the company is refusing to budge on key issue. "The Sony side failed to provide enough evidence that its format has a clear advantage over ours in terms of cost and range of applications," a Toshiba negotiator told the Nihon Keizai Shimbun business newspaper on Monday.

According to the negotiator, Toshiba thinks that further negotiation would be a waste of the company's time since Sony is not seriously looking at Toshiba's proposals. However, the company would not "give up the idea of forging a unified format."

Sony's Blu-ray relies heavily on proprietary technology, and was designed more for traditional DVD usage with video, despite its whopping 50-gigabyte capacity.

Toshiba HD-DVD discs will have two layers of data. One will be in the old DVD format, which can hold about five gigabytes. The second layer will have the data stored in HD-DVD format, which holds 15 gigabytes. Toshiba recently unveiled a new HD-DVD disc, however, which holds up to 45GB of data across three layers.