Blu-Ray will win next-gen DVD battle, says Fox boss

The co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment has thrown his company's not insubstantial weight behind Sony's Blu-Ray disc format, telling a conference in the USA that it will win the standards battle against Toshiba's HD-DVD.

James Gianopulos was speaking at Reuters' Advertising and Media summit in New York last week, where he told delegates that Fox will not be releasing any of its content on the rival HD-DVD format.

He explained that a number of factors conspired to give Blu-Ray a market lead, even though neither company has actually brought a product to market yet and will not do so until next year.

"In terms of the number of companies involved, the PS3 momentum and the level of content that is committed to Blu-Ray, it does seem to have a pretty strong lead," Gianopulos told the summit.

"We believe that Blu-Ray not only has the superior technology and backing in terms of strength to market, but also the superior content protection," he concluded.

While the battle between the two formats was originally being fought largely on the basis of cost - with Toshiba arguing that its standard offered significant cost-savings, while Sony argued that Blu-Ray is more technologically advanced - in recent months the focus has shifted to copy protection.

Movie studios have largely come out in favour of Blu-Ray due to the ability to implement what is seen as more secure or restrictive Digital Rights Management on the discs - while software firms such as Microsoft slammed the lack of a secure facility for ripping Blu-Ray content to other mediums without losing copy protection, although Sony has very recently made provision for this in the Blu-Ray system.