Disc drive

NEW YORK - The DVD stands out as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies ever, but in the electronics industry, it’s akin to an aging king in a Shakespearean drama — rivals are lurking, knives drawn.

Just as consumers are beginning to get comfortable with their DVD players, electronics manufacturers are set to introduce next-generation discs that store more — and would be harder to copy.

A dozen companies, led by Sony Corp., are pushing a disc called the Blu-ray.

The other main contender, the High Definition DVD, is promoted only by Toshiba Corp. and NEC Corp. But it has an important endorsement from an industry group and is expected to get Microsoft Corp.’s support as the software giant seeks a toehold for its multimedia format in the consumer electronics arena.

Movie studios generally aren’t commenting on the new formats. And the rival industry groups aren’t saying exactly when they expect to have players on the market. Both, however, consider the DVD ripe for replacement next year.

For consumers, the benefit of a new format would be better image quality. Sales of high-definition TV sets have finally started to take off, but current DVDs don’t have the resolution to get the most out of such sets.

For the industry, a new format could mean an escape from the low-margin market DVD players have become. From costing more than $500 when introduced in 1997, players now are available for less than $50.

The new discs, which look much like DVDs, would be read by players with newly developed blue lasers, which can pick out finer detail than the red lasers used to play DVDs and CDs. This lets the new discs store three to five times as much data as a DVD, enough for high-definition movies with surround sound.

Manufacturers from both groups plan also to build red lasers into their new players, allowing them to read current DVDs.

The Blu-ray disc has the most storage capacity, up to 50 gigabytes. However, it achieves that capacity by using a structure quite different from that of DVDs. This means that the companies that make prerecorded DVDs would have to invest in new equipment, which is sure to give Hollywood pause as it ponders which format to back.

The Blu-ray does have the widest support among electronics manufacturers, counting not only most of the big Japanese names, but also Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. in its consortium.

Toshiba’s HD-DVD stores up to 30 gigabytes, but can close the quality gap with the Blu-ray by using more efficient compression software than the MPEG-2 standard used in DVDs and planned for the Blu-ray. One of the several compression schemes that may go into the final HD-DVD standard is none other than Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 software.

“If that goes through, it’s going to be a huge win for Microsoft,” said Vamsi Sistla, an analyst at ABI Research. It wouldn’t necessarily mean a significant financial windfall — the analyst estimates that Microsoft may get 10 to 15 cents per player in royalties — but that’s not the point.

“More than money, they’re looking for the muscle power to enter the consumer electronics industry,” he said.

The HD-DVD has been endorsed by the DVD Forum, the industry group that created the DVD, but that may not be as crucial as it sounds. The group has not succeeded in gathering industrywide consensus for any disc standard since the original DVD in 1997. Its audio and rewriteable DVD standards have competitors.

The Blu-ray and HD-DVD use hardware advances to store high-definition movies. However, that’s not strictly necessary. Improvements in the software used to pack a movie onto a disc mean that it’s possible to store a high-definition movie on a regular DVD, albeit with poorer quality and fewer special features than on a blue-laser disc.

Microsoft demonstrated that when it helped bring out a high-definition version of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” on a DVD-ROM last year. It played only on computers, but in theory, a specially built DVD player could play it back.

That lesson wasn’t lost on Japan’s Asian competitors. In China, the EVD, or Enhanced Video Disc, is on sale. It uses software from On2 Technologies Inc. to store a high-definition movie on a slightly modified DVD, read by a red laser.

Not to be outdone, Taiwanese researchers this month demonstrated the FVD, or Forward Versatile Disc, based on the same principle. Players should be on sale this year.

The advantage of using red lasers is that the components are much cheaper than the blue-laser technology, and the players can read DVDs without a second laser.

With all these alternatives, there’s a “very good chance” that there won’t be one successor to the DVD, but several, Mr. Sistla said. The Blu-ray may dominate Japan, the cheaper EVD the rest of Asia, and the HD-DVD could be the format of choice in the United States and Europe.

The real kingmaker in the drama is Hollywood. Of the big studios, only Columbia TriStar has expressed support for either format. Because it’s owned by Sony, its choice was clear.