Two competing technologies which enable more than 20GB of data to be stored on each side of an optical disk are nearing commercialization, leading to fears that the industry could be split between support for one format or the other.
Toshiba and NEC have proposed their Advanced Optical Disc technology as a standard to the DVD Forum, a consortium of 212 companies. The forum is expected to settle on full specifications for AOD by the second quarter next year, said Hideyuki Irie, a DVD Forum official.
Earlier this year, the basic specifications for an alternative high-capacity standard known as Blu-Ray were announced by nine companies: Matsushita Electric Industrial, Royal Philips Electronics, Sony, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Pioneer, Samsung Electric, Sharp, and Thomson Multimedia.
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