Paramount Denies Report It Will Drop Toshiba's HD DVD (Update2)

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures denied a newspaper report that the studio is poised to follow Time Warner Inc. in abandoning Toshiba Corp.'s HD DVD technology.

``Paramount's current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format,'' Brenda Ciccone, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said in an e-mail today.

Toshiba, the leading promoter of the HD DVD format for high-definition video discs, fell in Tokyo trading after the Financial Times reported Paramount is poised to adopt Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray format instead.

Paramount can defect because a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp allows the studio to switch to Blu-ray if Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. dropped its support of Toshiba's standard, the newspaper reported today, citing unidentified people familiar with the plan. Warner Bros. said on Jan. 4 it would drop its support of HD DVD.

Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Tokyo-based Toshiba, said the report is speculative. Masayo Endo, a spokeswoman for Sony, declined to comment on the report.

Toshiba's shares fell 0.1 percent to close at 782 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange after dropping as much as 1.3 percent. Sony's stock rose 3.4 percent.

To contact the reporters on this story: Andy Fixmer in Los Angeles at afixmer@bloomberg.net; John Liu in Shanghai at jliu42@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jennifer Sondag at jsondag@bloomberg.net; Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net