Toshiba, NEC Plan To Create Yet Another Optical Format

selderrr writes: "Dow Jones Newswires is reporting today that Toshiba and NEC are planning to propose a new optical disk format to the DVD Forum that will offer four times more storage capacity than current DVDs. In February, a consortium of nine companies, including Sony and Matsushita, announced a new format that would offer 50GB of data storage. While the Toshiba/NEC option is smaller at 40GB, it is cheaper to produce. The two disc formats will not be compatible." Related, coryboehne writes "The New York Times has a great report detailing the history of the DVD. According to the article digital videodiscs and their players have now surpassed the VHS in terms of sales for the first time (In 2001, $10.3 billion was spent on movies, 52% of this on DVD's, now compare this to 2002, $12.4 billion total revenue with 65%, going for DVD's) . Funny considering that DVD's are only in about a third of American homes (about 30 million households, and consider that a quarter of these homes have more than one player), compare that to the unbelievable amount of VHS players (about 90% of homes in the USA have a VHS player) and it quickly shows just how popular the DVD has become."

Comments

dvd vs. vhs market share

[mshiltonj]

The reason dvds have so much market share compared to vhs is because the movie catalog rollout to dvd. People with DVDs who love Godfather will re-buy the title on DVD, even though they already have Godfather on VHS. People are replacing thier movie collection in the new format.

I'll be doing it for of the newly released special edition Pulp Fiction DVD.

I'm not a *new* buyer. I'm a *repeat* buyer of the same movie. Naturally, this is not sustainable. Ad DVD adoption increases, and as the back catalog is filled out and people have replaced their collection, DVD will be no different from what VHS is. I doubt VHS is going away soon.

Of course, when VHS *does* go away, and the DVD catalog is complete, and the everyone has replaced their collections -- the movie introduce an "all new" format and start the cycle over again.

For accurate head-to-head measurements, check unit sales of LOTR on VHS vs DVD.