The consumer electronics industry edged a step closer to an all-out war over a new digital videodisk standard yesterday, as Sony Corp. and Philips Electronics NV said they planned to move ahead with a new format that would compete with a technical standard proposed by Time Warner Inc. and Toshiba Corp.
In recent months, there has been widespread concern in Hollywood and in Japan that the new digital video technology, which is designed to permit storage of full-length feature films on compact disks, would lead to a replay of the Beta vs. VHS battle over videocassette formats in the 1980s. And yesterday's announcement seemed to indicate that just such a battle could ensue.
The announcement, made in Tokyo, surprised many industry executives, because it had been expected that Sony and Philips would drop their plans for a rival system.
Much of the consumer electronics and entertainment industry has been expected to back the Toshiba-Time Warner videodisk approach, since Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan threw its weight behind that standard late last month. Executives of Sony, Matsushita and Toshiba have met in recent weeks in an effort to settle differences on a digital video standard.
And several recent news reports, including an article Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, had indicated that Sony and Philips were preparing to drop their standard and join with Time Warner and Toshiba.
"This is foolish," said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a Seaford, N.Y., consulting firm. "Everything seemed to be moving toward unification. I think press reports pushed Sony into a corner, and this is an emotional and not a business or technology decision."
Time Warner executives also said the announcement surprised them.
"We are 100 percent comfortable in our technology, the commitment of the coalition partners and the forward plans for introduction of the product along with its application to computers," said Warren N. Lieberfarb, president of Warner Home Video Inc., a Time Warner subsidiary.
Several industry executives said yesterday that Sony might still be less than adamant on its position, because the announcement was made by Nobuyuki Idei, Sony's managing director, rather than by the company's president or deputy president.
But a top Sony consumer electronics executive in the United States said that the company fully intended to forge ahead with Phillips on an approach that would rival the Toshiba-Time Warner technology.
"What we have done is carefully evaluate the alternate technology, and we believe the technology we're proposing is superior," said Carl Yankowski, president and chief operating officer of the American unit, Sony Electronics.
The new approach would modify the format that Sony and Phillips widely demonstrated last month in an effort to rally support from the rest of the industry.
Sony said yesterday that it would try to build industry support for a new version of its single-sided disk, which would have a total storage capacity of 7.4 billion bytes of information, doubling the capacity of the version the company previously backed.
Its new proposal relies on a two-layer approach in which a laser is refocused on two separate planes of data.
The competing Toshiba-Time Warner proposed technology stores about 10 billion bytes on two sides. By comparison, today's compact audio and CD-ROM disks store only about 550 million total bytes.