Sony Exec: "We Won't Meet Blu-Ray Demand"

[JTK]

Courtesy of Reuters:

NEW YORK, May 10 (Reuters) - Sony Electronics is seeing the supply of electronic components tightening with accelerated sales of mobile phones and other devices, its president said on Wednesday.
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"Overall component supply is tightening up," Stan Glasgow, president and chief operating officer of the Sony Corp. division, said during an event in New York. He noted that a wide range of electronic devices such as mobile phones are "selling at a phenomenal rate."

Glasgow added that the company would not have enough inventory to supply demand for next-generation Blu-ray DVD players in the United States.

"It's going to be expensive," he said. "It will take time to get component prices down."

Glasgow's comments come amid a brewing industry war over the technology behind the next most advanced line of DVD players.

Blu-ray technology is competing with HD format DVD players as the next standard in the $24 billion-a-year home video market. Toshiba Corp. started rolling out its HD DVD format players in Japan over a month ago, becoming the first company to offer next-generation optical disc players worldwide.

Glasgow said he believed the battle over formats could be resolved within 12 to 24 months, but entertained the possibility of creating a player that combined both technologies.

"A lot has been invested" in such advanced DVD players, he said. "It's expensive having two different types of hi- definition technologies."

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As expected, I've seen this article FUD'ded, spun, and distorted to mean everything from "Sony blinks" "Sony is scared" "Sony is getting ready to bow down to HD-DVD and give in" and the rest of the usual HD-DVD/MS backed nonsense.


The most I take away from this article is:

Everyone's got to keep a back door open somewhere. It's a nice PR statement, if nothing else. We still see Sony having plenty of joint business ventures with Toshiba and NEC, among others.

Glasgow suggested a 12-24 month timeline for this so-called format war and I agree with him. One way or the other, I don't think it's going to take very long for either one of the existing formats to win (I hope it's BR) or for everyone to come back down to Earth with their egoes and give us the unified format that incorporates the best of both worlds like they should have in the first place.