U.S. film studio Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp will support the Blu-ray standard for next-generation optical discs, a Japanese business daily reported on Sunday, advancing the cause of Sony Corp and its partners in a war over the next generation of DVDs.
Backers of two rival DVD formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD, are wooing studios to issue movies in their format, in an echo of the VHS-Beta videotape battle of 20 years ago.
The rival formats, both of which use blue lasers to read discs, offer much greater capacity than existing DVDs. This would enable discs to hold higher-definition and longer recordings.
Blu-ray backers say their discs will hold 25 gigabytes of data, five times the capacity of current DVDs.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun said Twentieth Century Fox, the distributor of "Titanic", "Star Wars" and other blockbuster films, would join the Blu-ray Disc Association, which would be launched on Monday.
Obtaining the backing of Hollywood studios and their large film libraries will be key to winning the race to produce the next generation of DVDs.
No one at Sony, Twentieth Century Fox or its parent, News Corp Ltd., was available for comment.
The support of Twentieth Century Fox would be another step forward for the Blu-ray camp, whose case was buttressed last month when a group of companies led by Sony bought film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. for $2.85 billion plus debt.
The rival HD DVD camp groups Toshiba Corp., Sanyo Electric Co. and NEC Corp.
Blu-ray's backers include Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., the maker of Panasonic products, and Sharp Corp.
The blue laser light used for both technologies has a shorter wavelength than the red light used in current DVD recorders, so can read and store data at much higher densities.
Twentieth Century Fox was the sixth-largest player in the North American movie market in 2003 with a 8.8 percent market share, Nihon Keizai said, citing figures from the Hollywood Reporter.