DVD Industry Finally Comes to an Agreement Settling the DVD-RW/DVD+RW Battleby Robin LissPublished on Feb 18, 2002 12:00 AM 
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The DVD industry has finally DVD setteled the DVD-RW/DVD+RW battle. Instead of picking one format, either DVD-RW or DVD+RW which both were supported by large companies, nine corporations have come up with a new standard, called Blu-Ray disc.
The new disc standard is supported by Hitachi, Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita (Panasonic) Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Thomson Multimedia. The press release says: "The Blu-ray Disc enables the recording, rewriting and play back of up to 27 gigabytes (GB) of data on a single sided single layer 12cm CD/DVD size disc using a 405nm blue-violet laser."
The companies will begin licensing the new format in spring of 2002. The disc uses MPEG-2 video recording, a defacto-standard in all digital video compression for home distribution. In a move that is certainly geared towards the content producers, each disc will have a unique id that will enable copy protection.
The companies hope to produce a 50GB dual side disc. Whether or not the industry is hoping to replace the DVD standard with this new disc is unknown. The discs are not compatible in existing DVD players and this effort might just backfire creating a third standard instead of replacing two. It was unclear on whether or not the involved companies would be pulling or decreasing support from DVD-RW and DVD+RW to further promote the new Blu-ray disc format.