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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.
In fact I welcome such a move - if it's free for everyone to make their own home movies, without having to pay royalties for mpeg2 compression patents, and you can still fit the same amount of movie in a DVD, then why not? I hope the players will have hardware to play EVD movies, and if so, I'm a consumer, whatever is cheaper/better for me I take it, no matter where it comes from. Why is it that we have free bzip2 and ogg vorbis and similar compression methods, but for video we all must pay royalties. The tmpgenc program used to be a complete freeware, used to do mpeg2's for svcd's and dvd's for free, but the mpeg consortium got on the author's case so now he must collect payment for his program, now you only get 30 days evaluation time. Hey if someone wants to give me something equivalent or better for free, I'm not gonna be stupid and say no.
This is Tuesday. China's the Good Guy today.
Seriously - an alternative to DVDs that supports HDTV and has no copy protection, region control, or licensing (CSS) restrictions. How bad is that? If DVD had been invented by geeks, that's what DVD would have been!
Seems this is just the logical successor to VCD or SVCD. It's also backed up by tens of thousands of tanks whose commanders can tell Jack Valenti precisely where to stick it.
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.
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.