Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 16, 1995 TAG: 9509180062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
The electronics industry Friday agreed to a common design for the next generation of compact discs, eliminating the risk that consumers might buy a product that becomes obsolete the way Betamax videocassette recorders did in the 1980s.
The new CD will be the same size as the one now commonly used in stereos and personal computers. But it will hold about eight times more data, meaning a full-length movie or all nine Beethoven symphonies could fit on one disc.
The agreement marks one of the few times that a standard has been set for an electronics product before it even reached customers. The same thing happened with the original compact disc in the 1980s, allowing CDs to surpass vinyl records quickly as the preferred format for recorded music.
``When you put standardization together with a great product, the consumer embraced it,'' said Warren Lieberfarb, president of Warner Home Video Inc., one of many companies that plans to have movies on the new CDs by the 1996 holiday season.
Moreover, the new CDs may further reduce the differences between machines that play them.
It is already common, for instance, to play music CDs on personal computers, and many believe the same thing will happen with movie CDs.
Billions of dollars in future royalties were at stake in the debate over the new CD disc design.
Since last December, electronics companies have been lining up behind the competing designs of Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp., which together created the original CD with Philips Electronics NV.
Toshiba's key backers were Time Warner Inc. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world's largest electronics company. It also won support from many Hollywood studios. Sony's chief backer was Philips.
Companies wanted to avoid a format war of the kind that divided the videotape market 15 years ago. At that time, Sony promoted a format called Beta and Matsushita touted VHS. VHS eventually became the standard for consumers. As more and more movies were made for VHS, owners of Betamax products were left behind.
Consumers will have to buy new equipment to play the new CDs. But the new equipment will be able to run the old discs as well.
The main difference in the two competing designs was that Toshiba favored putting data on both sides of the CD, while Sony wanted to use just one side, the way existing CDs do.
In a compromise, the companies will use Toshiba's idea for obtaining more data space by bonding two ultra-thin discs together, but they will rely on Sony's idea of principally reading data from one side.
The result is that the new disc will hold 4,700 megabytes of data, less than Toshiba's idea but more than Sony's. Current CDs hold about 600 megabytes.
With the technical issues behind them, Toshiba and Sony now must decide how to divide the money that is expected to be made over the coming years.
``Everyone is cognizant of royalty issues and are comfortable they can be worked out,'' said Carl Yankowski, president of Sony Electronics Inc.
by CNB