It looks as if someone finally blinked in the give-no-quarter stand-off between Toshiba Corp and its acolytes on the one hand and Philips Electronics NV and Sony Corp on the other over a standard for digital video disks. Philips Electronics NV said yesterday at the Radio Fair in Berlin that the leading consumer electronics companies involved on either side have now entered talks over a common format for the disks. There are efforts going on to come to a common format, Henk Bodt, a Philips vice-president, said, adding that the parties began talks after August 14 but that so far there had been no concrete proposals for a new format. It’s going to take a considerable number of months discussing the new format, he said. It could well be Philips itself that blinked, because the Dutch company said earlier this year said that it would be in no-one’s interests to re-run the 1980s VHS-Betamax dogfight over video tape standards. Despite being the owners of the by far the most content of any of the major consumer electronics manufacturers – each has one of the world’s big six record companies and a movie studio – Philips and Sony are in a critically weak position because no other major content provider has endorsed their format, so that if players built to both standards go out, the Philips and Sony entertainment companies run the risk of having to put their music and movies out for both formats or risk losing potentially enormous sales, while the likes of MCA Inc and Time Warner Inc put all their material out in the Toshiba format only.
