Recently, Toshiba announced that New Line Cinema, Paramount, Time Warner, Universal Studios, and Viacom would support Toshiba's next-generation HD-DVD format with high-definition (HD) DVD movies that will be on sale in time for Christmas 2005. The announcement marks a big boost for HD-DVD, which is competing with Blu-Ray to become the next-generation DVD movie standard. Each of the movie studios said it would release as many as two dozen titles for the fledgling format, which can store 17GB of data on a single-sided disk, compared to about 27GB for Blu-Ray. NEC and Toshiba are championing HD-DVD, whereas Panasonic, Philips, and Sony are backing Blu-Ray. Of course, the movie industry's support for HD-DVD doesn't rule out the possibility that it will support Blu-Ray in the same manner. And when it does—and it will, folks—it's time for Betamax vs. VHS, Round Two.
