Universal Music Group announced they had signed on to the Blu-Ray DVD format developed by Sony in the latest round of DVD Wars. This marks a major victory in the cosmic conflict between Japanese electronics goliaths Sony and Toshiba.
With the motion picture industry and the electronics and computers industry picking sides, it was only a matter of time before the music industry weighed in as well and right now Sony’s holding the records in this fight. Sony/BMG and UMG together make up about half of the music industry. The music companies will use the DVD format for music videos and concerts, although with 50 or 100 gigs, that’s a lot of videos.
French based Vivendi is the parent company of UMG, the world’s label in CD sales. The Sony/BMG and UMG combined bring huge stables of artists as well as massive catalogs of older material. This is surely a bad mark against Toshiba and the HD DVD format although this war is far from over.
This war involves just about any company with a stake in a form of recorded media. Sony wields a lot force in this argument because they produce electronics, movies, music and lots of other products. All of these will use this disk. A number of big companies have sided with them too. Disney, Dell, and Fox just to name a few have all sided with Sony. Companies like Time-Warner, Paramount, Universal and Microsoft have all sided with Toshiba. Game companies are also starting to come online with one side or the other as well but that’s a whole other article.
It’s going to get frustrating very quick for the consumer too as two formats of DVDs hit the market perhaps sooner than later and people will be forced to either buy one or the other or both in some cases on top of the HDTV needed watch these new films on.
Sony’s been through this fight before when the battled and lost against Panasonic back in the 80s over videotape formats. Panasonic has sided with Sony this time by the way.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
