Chances looked slim that consumers will be spared a DVD format war, as the backers of one standard said on Friday there was no common ground for a unified format and it was on track for a market launch within a year.
"If we want a unified standard, it has to be better than the sum of the parts. We would like to find something that"s better in the other standard than ours, but we haven"t found it," said Frank Simonis, a spokesman for backers of the Blu-ray standard. Speaking on the sidelines of the IFA consumer electronics trade fair, Simonis said the Blu-ray association was ready to lay down the specifications of the higher-capacity DVD format in the spring of 2006.