Blu-ray Discs

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is the industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray Disc technology and is responsible for establishing format standards and promoting business opportunities for Blu-ray Disc. The BDA is divided into three levels of membership: the Board of Directors, Contributors, and General Members.[1]
The "Blu-ray Disc founder group" was started on May 20, 2002 by nine leading electronic companies: Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG (Lucky GoldStar) Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung[2]. In order to enable more companies to participate, it announced in May 2004 that it would form the Blu-ray Disc Association, which was inaugurated on October 4, 2004

In 1997, a new technology emerged that brought digital sound and video into homes all over the world. It was called DVD, and it revolutionized the movie industry.
The industry is set for yet another revolution with the introduction of Blu-ray Discs (BD) in 2006. With their high storage capacity, Blu-ray discs can hold and play back large quantities of high-definition video and audio, as well as photos, data and other digital content.
In this article, HowStuffWorks explains how the Blu-ray disc works and how it was developed, and we'll see how it stacks up against some other new digital video formats on the horizon.
A current, single-sided, standard DVD can hold 4.7 GB (gigabytes) of information. That's about the size of an average two-hour, standard-definition movie with a few extra features. But a high-definition movie, which has a much clearer image (see How Digital Television Works), takes up about five times more bandwidth and therefore requires a disc with about five times more storage. As TV sets and movie studios make the move to high definition, consumers are going to need playback systems with a lot more storage capacity.