Toshiba Corp. and its partners formed a group Wednesday to promote their HD DVD format for next-generation DVDs as the battle for a global standard continued.
The managing members of the HD DVD Promotion Group are Toshiba, Memory-Tech Corp., NEC Corp. and Sanyo Electric Co., Toshiba officials said.
The group will provide technical information to electronics manufacturers and DVD software producers to facilitate production of DVD players and software that support the HD DVD format, they said.
Some 90 companies are expected to join the group, whose inaugural meeting will take place in March, they said.
HD DVD's competition, the Blu-ray Disc Association, is led by Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
The association said Wednesday it now has some 100 members, including famous software producers like U.S. filmmakers 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney Co. as well as Bandai Visual Co., a Japanese animation producer that joined the association the same day.
"We expect the Blu-ray Disc to strengthen our content technology and enable higher picture quality," Bandai Visual Senior Managing Director Shigeru Watanabe said in a statement.
"Bandai Visual's decision is recognition that high-quality content needs high-quality technology," said Sony Corp. Senior Vice President Kiyoshi Nishitani on behalf of the BDA.
The HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc camps are expected to increase their efforts to woo software producers to their respective formats for next-generation DVDs, which offer higher definition and greater capacity.
But software producers may join both groups in order to get technical information about the two different formats.