Sony Blu-Ray format plans for Europe

Entertainment industry giants Sony has revealed its plan for the European market with regards to the Blu-Ray storage format. The company is already due to begin shipping its first Blu-ray Disc media in Europe.

The company said in a statement that single-layer BD-RE (Blu-ray Disc Rewritable) discs would be available from mid March. In addition, the Single-layer write-once BD-R (Blu-ray Disc Recordable) media will be available from April. The company would launch dual layer discs later this year.

The single layer Blu-ray discs being offered by the company would be capable of storing up to 25GB of data. This itself is around 5 times the storage capacities offered by regular DVD discs available in the market today.

The initial versions of this media would support writing at 2x speeds. Fritz Handtke, Marketing and Operations Director of Sony Europe’s Recording Media & Energy (RME) division said in a statement on these plans: “We are committed to becoming a dominant player in the Blu-ray Disc media market in 2006. Given our technological expertise, our focus is on providing thrilling new High Definition entertainment experiences and the highest capacity PC data storage of any optical format.”