Sony expects Blu-Ray victory

The recent delay to the roll-out of Toshiba's next-gen DVD standard, HD-DVD, has led a senior Sony Pictures executive to confidently predict that Sony's rival Blu-Ray standard will dominate the market within 12 months.

Speaking to HomeMediaRetailing.com, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment president Benjamin Feingold fingered the PlayStation 3, which will sport a Blu-Ray drive, as a major factor that will drive the adoption of the standard.

"I think in 12 months it's going to be clear," he predicted. "The combination of Blu-Ray and PlayStation 3 machines is going to overwhelm any HD-DVD presence and all studios will have to support Blu-Ray."

Feingold's comments come after Toshiba was forced to admit that the first HD-DVD players and recorders will not launch until 2006, eliminating the market head-start which supporters of the standard had hoped to be able to create.

However, Toshiba still claims that HD-DVD will be a more popular standard as manufacturing costs for the discs are lower than they are for Blu-Ray - although Sony's rival standard boasts higher data (and hence video) capacity.

While PlayStation 3 will support Blu-Ray out of the box - a feature which some reports suggest could add as much as $100 to the manufacturing costs of the console - Microsoft has stuck with standard DVDs for Xbox 360, saying only that it may add a HD-DVD drive to a future version of the console.