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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."
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...)
its called VCD :P
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Then where will Americans get their $2 bootleg DVDs?
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?
China is the only country to make decent DVD players. Their players don't force you to watch commercials, they don't force macrovision on you, and they don't enforce region coding.
Now we can:
* Bootleg Chinese DVDs to sell on every market corner in the US
* Make a US region and sell unlocked US-made DVD players in China
* Terribly mispell Chinese words in our manual
* Make badly lip-synced English voice overs on the DVDs
* Open Caucasian-run DVD stores in China with thousands of bootlegs, and canned American food
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
My first thought when i read this is "Great Firewall".
Picture this:
1) China develops its incompatible format and patents it.
2) They won't provide licenses to anyone they don't want to.
3) They forbid the use of the DVD standard, so people won't be able to buy or copy DVD's.
4) They copy the DVD's and release them (censored of course) in their own format.
5) ???
6) Total Control!
Or maybe I'm too paranoid? Perhaps they only want economical gains from this, so 6) Profit!!
I really don't know.
""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.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I honestly don't understand what China thinks it will accomplish. You don't become an economic juggernaut by taking steps to cut yourself off from the rest of the world. If China wants the economic benefits of creating standards rather than just using them, they need to create a standard that the rest of the world will adopt. That way *they* can control the standard and ensure its success.
Instead they're merely making an incompatible version of someone else's standard. Something which they have no real economic power to force. They can force it politically, but that would simply piss off "The People of China" that much more when they can't import any foreign entertainment. (Certainly, a big import/export for any first world country.)
The only thing I can say is that it's probably again about control. They aren't looking at the economic implications, they're looking at preventing ideas like "freedom", "democracy", and "Dallas" (I'm only half-way joking here) from being imported.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Xbox360 games use DVDs.
Which is the reason MS supports HD-DVD. They've got nothing to lose. They announced their intent to think about the possibility to include an HD drive for movie playback at some time in the future or not. So if Blu-Ray wins big deal, MS simply puts a BR drive in their consoles. On the other hand if they can kill Blu-Ray, they negate one of the main advantages of the PS3 (i.e. the one that it is a HD player. Sony sold a lot of PS2s that way when stand-alone DVD players were still expensive) one Sony will use to justify the (supposedly) higher price of their console
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
...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.