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China To Develop Its Own DVD Format
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an MSNBC story covering a move by the Chinese entertainment industry to create their own DVD standard, the second such announcement in two years. From the article: "If successful, the move could add a new wrinkle to the battle between HD DVD and the competing Blu-ray Disc formats over which will become the dominant new DVD standard. The official Xinhua News Agency said the new standard will be based on but incompatible with HD DVD, which is being promoted by Toshiba Corp. and Universal Studios, as well as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., the leading suppliers of chips and software for most of the world's personal computers."
WHY? What's wrong with uniform standards for the whole world? Why can't I just buy stuff from where I want to buy it?
Are you kidding man? You can't compare it with high-end uber-users stuff, but the 'quality' is up to the level that majority of the world uses it. Check out which piece of electronic in your home is not made in China.
Good luck getting anyone to care. If it were Japan with Sony's backing, then ok.
But China....um, no.
*flips over a DVD (from the future)* "Made in China"
Unlikely
HIGHLY Unlikely
The Chinese government will certainly benefit from this. If the hardware sold in China is no longer capable of playing foreign discs, then the Chinese government will have absolute control of what can be viewed by most of the Chinese people.
If the Chinese government doesn't like a political documentary, they can simply refuse to release it domestically. The Great Firewall will prevent you from downloading a copy, and smuggling a foreign copy in will no longer be an option. You won't be able to play it, after all.
Do you like German cars?
... the rest of the world probably doesn't care. While China may be on the same physical planet as the rest of us, they arent playing on the same logical field. In terms of copywrite and intellectual property, we are completely seperate worlds, and I doubt either really cares about the other.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
""If successful, the move could add a new wrinkle to the battle between HD DVD and the competing Blu-ray Disc formats over which will become the dominant new DVD standard. "
If successful, the could also heavily regulate what their populace is allowed to view given their complete control over this specialized format that nobody else will ever use. Yeah, color me a tad paranoid, but I nearly always assume that the Chinese government has ulterior motive beyond the headlines. Of course, they could be doing it for pure profit and control of an industry standard, but lets face it, they're starting a bit late in the game and offering little in the way of innovation to actually have any sort of leverage. But saying 'yay' or 'nay' as to which movies (and ideas) get pressed for their populace to view? Yeah, I can see that.
That's not to say I think it'll work in either senario. The standards are too entrenched either way and their competition already has a head start and mass marketing experience.
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They probably don't want to pay technology license fees to the west. I don't blame them.
Not to sound jingoistic by any means, but 'made in China' and 'quality product' rarely appear in the same paragraph (with the exception of this one...)
Having friends with factories in China, I can tell you that quality can be adjusted any way you want.
You want cheap products, they can make it cheap, they skimp on QA to save dollars. However, if you want them to produce high quality goods, they can do that too, just add some extra $$$ to the bottom line and they can make it to whatever quality standard you want.
It's all about how much you want to spend.
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Now, in America, it's the Chinese who are seen to be a bungling satellite economy dependent upon American management and good old American know how. And how did that turn out last time around with the japanese?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
electronics factory in china, employed in the production of THOUSANDS of DVD players for export to the US, suddenly grows incredibly profitable, while at the same time recording a much higher than thought possible component/device failure rate in production....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Are you aware there's more than a billion people living in China? That is one big market. Yes, they can afford to cut themselves off.
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True, but 'much cheaper' or 'chinese made' does not automatically implies 'poor quality'. This is the sweeping statement that the original poster made which I don't agree.
Moreover, we have to wonder why so much stuff that we use these days are made in China. Different people have different perception on quality, and I won't say that most of the Chinese stuff are "quality-made" per se. However, these Chinese made stuff has to reach a certain quality level in order be adopted so widely and used everyday by so many in household or business - and I dare to say, some of them depend on these Chinese made stuff. If they are so bad quality that will work for a moment and next moment it ceases to work, then I'll bet everybody will yell and holla about it, and refuse to buy anything made in China. I think it was like that maybe 5 - 10 years ago, and it's a fun joke about 'stuff made in China', but now apparently that's less and less of the case.
...they gain amazing market leverage. They aren't cutting themselves off, they are guaranteeing profits and not even have to even think about exporting cash. Explanation: they have the industrial capacity to still EXPORT any and all formats,in any quantity, anywhere, to anyone, so they don't care about "formats" except it's a market. But, who will want to try and make a chinese standard disk and try to import it INTO china and expect to make a profit? Answer, no one. See, they cover their humongous domestic market, plus the rest of the planet. Win/Win for them, and guaranted to most always keep their rapidly expanding internal markets domesticaly driven. Yes, they import, and they mostly import machine tools to go ahead and setup more factories to build stuff, when it comes to durable goods, that or prototypes they can either license legally and clone or just heck with it, clone anyway. It's only taken them 25 or so years to go from a marginal player with a huge population to the worlds leading manufacturing nation, and all the indicators say this will continue until they are also the highest GDP.
They are long term strategic thinkers, they don't fool much with this quarters profit mentality. That's why they are out there signing 20 year energy deals or outright buying up the sources, along with strategic minerals.
They aren't looking at the economic implications, they're looking at preventing ideas like "freedom", "democracy", and "Dallas" [wikipedia.org] (I'm only half-way joking here) from being imported. I don't think so (translate: what you said is complete B.S.) China just doesn't want to pay royalty to the current patent holders. If China adopted the existing standards, it would have to pay for every DVD player it made. China industry has been groaning over this for years. Not everything is about politics.
"You don't become an economic juggernaut by taking steps to cut yourself off from the rest of the world. "
Of what use is a standard developed in Japan or the United States when DVD players are still manufactured in China anyway? China has the power to put this new standard onto store shelves around the world, and the debate between content publishers and technology companies will seem moot when the consumers themselves are presented an option that is cheaper than both competitors (because there's no obnoxious licensing fees).
Both flavors of Western(-esque) corporations may want to use a format that lets them enact DRM or region control, but ultimately they will have to sell on a format that people will buy, or no format at all.
Personally, with my dissatisfaction with the interests involved in the BluRay vs. HD-DVD debate, I'm very interested to see what the PRC has to offer. The "communists" may finally show us how capitalism is supposed to work.
If they had support for high definition without copy protection, this should hopefully become the worldwide standard.