Following recent announcements of a move towards compromise in the heated battle to become the next generation home video standard, the Tuesday morning Nihon Keizai Shimbun contains a first report on the shape that such a compromise will take. According to the paper, Sony and Toshiba have entered into final preparations for a format which combines disk technology from Sony with software technology from Toshiba. The two companies plan to offer an unified format to members of their respective high definition video forums as early as next week.

Toshiba's decision to give way on the disk format was apparently made after examining cost issues related to the Sony technology. The merged format will make use of Sony's 0.1 millimeter Blu-ray disk technology with Toshiba's software in place for reading and writing from the disk and handling copyright protection. Toshiba's 0.6 millimeter HD-DVD disk technology will be dropped. The resulting technology will be offered as a new format. It's unclear at this point if the new format will adopt the Blu-ray or the HD-DVD name, or if something completely new will be used.

Sony announced late last year that the next generation PlayStation would make use of the Blu-ray format. The Nihon Keizai article reveals that, as part of the compromise, Blu-ray supporters Sony and Matsushita were demanding the highest possible storage space for future IT and game applications. This would suggest that, even though Blu-ray as it was known is gone, the new merged standard will end up serving as the format for PS3.

Source : PS3 IGN