In Business This Week

FORMAT WARS: THE SAGA CONTINUES

ANOTHER BATTLE IN THE WAR over electronics standards. Early this year, Toshiba and Time Warner declared victory for their digital video disks (DVD) technology--a format for playing movies and music on compact disks. The duo signed up powerful Hollywood studios and consumer-electronics companies to back the standard. Now, Sony and Philips have countered with a high-density CD format that holds reams of video, sound, and text--and unlike its rival, it's erasable. Sony and Philips are pitching their disks largely as a replacements for CD-ROMs used in personal computers. But PC companies are urging the two sides to come up with a single standard.EDITED BY THANE PETERSON