With the launch of the PlayStation 3, Sony is playing not just for the gaming console crown but for the future of home entertainment itself, in the shape of the next generation of DVDs. But can it pull it off this time?

We have been here before. Sony has been trying to own the industry standard format ever since it lost its battle to make Betamax the standard for video tape, losing out to JVC's VHS in the 1970s. Back then, all it had was the player. This time around it is putting its Blu-ray DVD player inside PS3, turning it into a Trojan horse for its global ambitions.

So why did we end up here?

In the last format tussle of the early 1990s, Toshiba beat Sony to become the DVD standard that all the other players ended up having to follow. Left smarting from this, Sony and Philips started working on a next-generation system for High definition TVs, which became the Blu-ray disc.

Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray use the same blue-violet laser to read the discs. But that is where the similarity ends. The Blu-ray disc has more grooves than its HD-DVD adversary, allowing it to hold more data. This makes the two formats incompatible. And because a Blu-ray disc has a more complex and delicate surface, it is more expensive to produce than HD-DVD.

For its part, Toshiba assembled a crowd of backers for its HD-DVD format. This included Microsoft, which was itself developing a console to take on the PlayStation, which became the Xbox 360.

But instead of concentrating on a pure-gaming platform to take on the Xbox, Sony saw its chance to seed the market by incorporating a Blu-ray DVD player as standard in the PS3, a move that a standalone Blu-ray player could not achieve.

So we are left today with the prospect that, come March when PS3 launches in Europe, we will be entering a new format war, though with the launch this month in Asia, it has already begun over there.

For this battle, both camps have assembled content backers. The Fox movies group has gone with Blu-ray, after finding its Philips-developed anti-piracy technology to its liking. It is joined by Lions Gate and Disney/Buena Vista. The HD-DVD standard was backed exclusively by Universal Pictures, though it has now joined Warner Bros, HBO, Paramount and New Line in pledging support for both formats. Sony can of course count on the backing of its own Sony Pictures.

The fact that Blu-ray has a large data capacity, will be appearing in new PCs and will be a recordable format product at launch has also counted in its favour.

However, in theory any studios could release in both formats in the future, and so far HD-DVD has had better films made available to it and had more favourable reviews than the largely untried Blu-ray.

Some DVD player manufacturers are hedging their bets. Samsung, for instance, says it will bring out a dual-format player. And a fly in the ointment of Sony's strategy is that in the past week Microsoft officially released the external HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 console in the US. At $200 (€154), it is already the cheapest high definition next-generation DVD option on the market.

In the middle of this war, the "old-fashioned" DVD format may actually do just fine. A current DVD player can be bought for less than a €100, and with plenty of existing titles to choose from, consumers may well just ignore the battle of the technology giants.