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China to Promote Own Alternative to DVDs, EVD
supermanksu writes "Seeking to compete on its own terms in the lucrative entertainment industry, China announced a government-funded project Tuesday to promote an alternative to DVDs and 'attack the market share' of the global video format." This has been an ongoing project.
First we have region encoded dvds so we can't watch dvds from out of our country or "zone" ... and now we won't even be able to fall back on "reverse engineering" our dvd players to play these things! Ugh. Just what we need, more complexity in an already needlessly complex market.
The anti-salmon
I don't think it's wise to force everyone into a new, irrelevant (unless you own an HDTV) format just to avoid paying American royalty fees.
Doubt they will force everyone, it will be enough for the format to be adopted domestically. As long as they market a combo DVD-EVD player, and push for releases of content on EVD in China, then what does it matter if you purchase this format or that?
DVDs are already segemented acording to their region, which might end up making it easier to introduce a regional DVD alternative. They don't have to target the US, just Asia, and other Asia electronics manufacturers might see the benifit of a regional technology for domestic consumption.
So, you imagine a high percentage of the Chinese population already have DVD players? We're talking about a 1.3 billion population here not California, the national savings would be inordinate.
I don't see EVD being much of a issue outside of China because it does not offer any advantage to consumers (DVD has HDTV plans too). Unless China wants to spend $100 million (or more) marketing the new format to Western consumers, they aren't going to get any market share here. Even in China, it will be an uphill battle. I don't see why Chinese consumers would buy the more expensive format, unless they are Patriotic and have money to burn. Also, I'd bet that media production has reached critical mass for DVD. How will China convince pressing plants to adapt to EVD?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I agree. A country that has 20% of the world's population has no business throwing all its money away to foreign monopolies. China can create its own standards, and have the rest of the world adopt them (and not vice-versa) becuase the foreign businesses couldn't resist the money-making opportunity. If China were buying Microsoft licenses at the same rate per populace as in the U.S., then they would be sending Microsoft enough money to buy a few countries of its own.
Yeah, the domestic Chinese market is only 1/4 the world market, or 4 times larger than the American domestic market.
How on earth do they expect this to fly with a highly patriotic and semi captive market of only a billion or so people?
It's madness.
And certainly no one here on Slashdot would feel inclined to adopt the standard if the Chinese choose to make it competitive by releasing it as an open standard ala the CD.
We just love attempts to "DVDize" the Compact Disc.
What would be wrong about taking the format out of the hands of the MPAA and DVD Consortium? Just the fact that it comes from China?
Like the compass, silk, lacquer, gunpowder and noodles?
A good idea is a good idea. I think an open video format is a good idea. If that's what the Chinese are up to I'll go at least one round of The East is Red with them.
KFG
just to avoid paying American royalty fees
Let me try to explain it here. Avoiding paying royaties to US and EU is a major component of any sensible comercial or industrial policy in a developing country. in market the size of China's any cent not leaving the country is a cent to be invested in a million of important things to the Chinese population.
Incidentally that is also one of the major reasons for countries like Brazil, India and China to be seriously looking at Open/Free Software - in the medium and long term, the savings in royalties not send abroad usually justify any short-term problems that may arise.
"The DVD format was the most quickly adopted new media format ever."
To be fair, the difference between CD's and cassettes is not as big as the difference between DVDs and VHS. CDs were nice because they were higher quality and you could instantly skip to other songs, but they were trouble to jog/travel with. DVDs are higher visual/audio quality than VHS, but they're also smaller (CD's weren't as compact as casettes) and they have extra bonus features that VHS couldn't hope to do.
CD's were an upgrade to casettes with tradeoffs, whereas DVDs are a much larger upgrade to VHS with much fewer in terms of tradeoffs. It's not all that surprising that DVDs took off.
EVDs are higher resolution and may be cheaper, but is that enough to be adopted? Boy do I doubt it.
"Derp de derp."
Absolutely, in fact this is almost certainly the plan these manufacturers have in mind.
The pirates are always happy to pursue any moneymaking opportunity they can find; within a few months of their introduction, pirated DVD's were already almost as widely available as VCD's, and no doubt once people start buying EVD players the same thing will happen.
Then, once people have EVD players and widely available disks, legitimate movie companies will have no choice but to adopt EVD; otherwise, they'll have a base of millions and millions of consumers who have no choice but to buy pirated EVD's. And considering the pragmatic-to-a-fault attitude of the Chinese courts and legislators towards such matters, I suspect that they'll give the studios a hard time about cracking down on pirated EVD's until legitimate alternatives are available. Yes, since they're not well-protected those EVD's can then be easily pirated as well, but since that's already true about DVD's it hardly makes a difference at this point (and will probably translate to further cost savings since there's less sophisticated decoding hardware required, perhaps even allowing them to use older and cheaper processes for chip fabrication etc).
So this could be a real coup for the Chinese - single-handedly force the studios to adopt a poorly-secured, proprietary video format just to stay in the market.
Don't look for these to show up in the US, though; DVD players are already way too common, so they'll never show up officially, and considering eBay's sheer and utter spinelessness towards MPAA legal threats it's doubtful we'll see them show up there either.
"as the CFO of my company put it, china needs to wake up if they want to play with the big boys in the global economy."
your CFO is an idioty and doesn't understand China's policy at long term stratagy. pretty scary for a CFO.
Why should China play with 'the Big boys'?
'The Big Boys' are pissing off a lot of the people that buy there goods. If china comes up with a format that DVD manufatures can play, and is cheaper to press, and it gives consumers what they want, then they will win.
Keep in mind, China has longterm goals in mind, while 'The Big Boys' are having a problem seeing past the next quarter.
'The Big Boys' had better start thinking long term, put money into things that are required for a good foundation for there respective countries, and stop pissing people off. Otherwise they will loose.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1. Elf
2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
3. Matrix: Revolutions
4. Brother Bear
5. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
6. Love Actually
7. Scary Movie 3
8. Radio
9. Tupac: Resurrection
10. Mystic River
Some of the best movies out there are Chinese. Check out Wong Kar Wai's movies, Jet Li's movies, Sammi Cheng's movies - different genres but great shit. In addition, Chinese audiences are more open to foreign movies than Americans - VCD shops will sell top American, Korean, and Japanese stuff as well.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
China wants to manufacture DVD players, without having to pay $17 for every one it manufactures. So they invent their own system, EVD, which is similar to DVD but uses completely different file formats, video/audio encoding algorithms, etc, so no-one can complain they're infringing patents. Maybe they also have a capability to interface with a computer, for data transfer. They then get loads of films released in EVD format - this'll mostly be Chinese-language films for the China and Taiwan markets. (There might be films for other Asian markets: Japan, Korea, India, etc). Maybe there will be some USA or European films as well.
The main people buying EVD players will be in Asia, and diaspora Asian communities in Europe and the USA. The DVD manufacturers can't complain, since it isn't infringing their IP. Nor can Holywood. Then, as if from nowhere, REOM images appear on the Internet that when downloaded and put into an EVD player, make it able to play DVDs. Of course, the EVD manufacturers make public noises about how naughty it is to download these ROM images, and illegally play DVDs...
I've no idea how accurate this scenario is, it's just a guess.
China's domestic A/V markets is estimated to be US$20 billions this year but, in reality, it's only $2 billions due to the pirating. Fighting pirating is difficult in China while pirated CD sales are providing the mean to feed large group of people in a country with 250M unemployed.
Realizing cracking down the pirating is not possible in short term, the large medias companies such as Disney has been pricing their products closed to the pirated copies. A legit Disney DVD costs about $3 while the pirated costs about $1.
Waving out the royalty fee for DVD would help the media companies to close the cost gap between legit copies and pirated copies.
Moreover, Chinese manufecture about 50% or more of DVD players for export. They haven't complaining about paying royalty on that but they want EVD to be used domestically to avoid paying DVD royalty for domestic market.