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UK cinemas share digital windfall TOKYO (Reuters) - The president of Toshiba Corp. said on Thursday producers of the next generation of optical discs will eventually use one format, although products based on two competing standards may be around for a limited time. Toshiba (6502.T: Quote, Profile, Research) and Sony Corp. (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) , leading rival camps, have waged a three-year battle to have their standards adopted for new DVDs, which promise much greater capacity for high-definition movies. The head of Sony Corp's game unit seemed to agree with the idea that there will be two formats in the market, saying he planned to launch Sony's next-generation game console next spring based on its own optical disc standard. But Ken Kutaragi, known as the father of the PlayStation, also suggested on Thursday there was a still window of opportunity for a unified format. "The only hope is if we can reach an agreement in a week or two on a new format that is not that different from Blu-ray physically," Kutargai told reporters at a gathering of business executives when asked if there were still time to agree on a unified format and have that incorporated in the PlayStation 3. Toshiba, Japan's second-largest electronics conglomerate, backs a new DVD technology called HD-DVD, while Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (6752.T: Quote, Profile, Research) are the leaders of rival format Blu-ray. "We may actually have a situation where merchandise from both sides is put on store shelves. But the market would not allow that situation to last very long," Toshiba President Tadashi Okamura told Japanese business leaders. The two sides have been engaged in a last-ditch effort to forge a common format, but no substantial progress has been made so far. Both sides say that reaching a unified format would be ideal to avoid confusion and inconvenience, which occurred with the VHS-Beta battle over video tape formats two decades ago. But the clock is ticking. Toshiba plans to launch HD DVD-based players by the end of 2005, and Sony plans to put a Blu-ray disc drive in its new PlayStation game console next year.
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