Big six agree strategy to promote DVD cause

Cracks in DVD consortium continue to blight standard despite agreement of six surviving members.

The DVD consortium is showing further signs of fragmenting - only sixt of six surviving members. of the original 10 members have agreed on methods to accelerate the take-up of the putative standard.

Hitachi, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Time Warner, Toshiba and Victor said they will license patents for DVD write (Ram) and DVD read only (Rom).

The news, announced at the DVD Forum in Berlin this week, will set the cat among the four other DVD pigeons, which decided to break with the consortium earlier this year.

Philips, Sony, Pioneer and French company Thomson split from the original group and said they would go ahead with their own read-write optical drive standard. The decision, however, has led to stalemate in the marketplace.

The big six are now in negotiations with the renegades in the hope that the patent issues can be settled without the courts being involved.

If the disputes are not settled swiftly, the whole potentially lucrative DVD market is likely to be stymied - especially with the further problem that some third-party suppliers, which were not in the original gang of 10 at all, have already produced players to the original specification.

For instance, Samsung has had DVD players in production for some months, but has had difficulty selling them because it does not want to become involved in a patents war.

Gary Thompson, the CEO of accelerator board manufacturer S3, has said that DVD drives will not replace VCRs because of conflicting formats.

He said that users are more likely to watch films on PCs rather than using a DVD drive as a replacement for a video recorder.