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Troubling Times for Chinese DVD Standard
Turtlewind writes "China's second largest home electronics retailer Suning announced today that it will stop selling new EVD products. This blow for China's home-grown video disc standard comes just days after some of China's largest DVD player manufacturers flatly denied claims by EVD Industry Alliance secretary general Zhang Baoquan that all the alliance's members would stop producing DVD equipment by 2008.
The EVD standard — which was discussed on Slashdot back in 2003 — uses different encoding technology to avoid the license fees on DVD equipment. Unfortunately for EVD's backers, which included the Chinese government, the new standard failed to take off in the face of China's large existing DVD market."
You are attempting to replace an item that is heavily entrenched in consumers' mindshare and financial investment with something that offers no real benefit to the consumer? And we are suprised this failed, why?
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You are attempting to replace an item that is heavily entrenched in consumers' mindshare and financial investment with something that offers no real benefit to the consumer?
That's obviously true everywhere else but China, but what's at least a little surprising is that it's true in China as well. The thing you have to remember is that China is a large enough market to sustain its own standard (ignoring the outside world of course). The interesting part is that the Chinese government can't really control the home video market inside China. China has to essentially bow out to market forces here. I'd say it's really more telling of how much China has become part of the world economy than anything else.
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Why not create players that support both standards? For the first while they'll still need to pay the DVD licensing, but over time as dual-mode players take over the market, they could sell more discs as compatible EVD players emerge. Eventually, they could replace DVD enough that ditching the DVD-compatability wouldn't be quite as painful.
As for benefit to consumer, how about not having the cost of licensing passed along to them, not having region-locked discs, not having unskippable ads (see: Shrek 2 disc), etc
Is the DVDCA really collecting licensing fees from domestic Chinese manufacturers?
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This has little to do with IP laws they were simply looking for a way so they don't have to pay the $20 per a player fee to the DVD group to handle the royalties on the codecs.
This is China, right? Since when have they cared about things like royalties or others' intellectual property?
I suspect that if they wanted to make DVD players without paying the $20 fee, they'd just make DVD players, not pay the fee, and sell them within China.
I think this is more about producing a format within China that won't be adopted by the rest of the world, allowing the Chinese government more control over the media its people watch.
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Here is an example of flag waving patriotism gone wrong. The idea sounds good--make a new license free standard for domestic manufacturers, but they never considered who'll publish in the new format. None of the American movie studios will publish without strict DRM and region control, and I doubt Chinese domestic publishers and pirates would care to embrace a new, uncertain format. And to have a dual-format player (DVD+EVD), the manufacturer has to pay the license anyway.
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You shouldn't be surprised by any of this. China is like the good old USSR, giving the pro-China view on things, no matter how completely it conflicts with reality.
Look for some older articles on AVS (the video codec used on EVD). You'll find numerous claims that it's superior to H.264 in quality/bitrate, while decoding with a fraction of the CPU power...
When they got around to releasing samples, everyone got to see that AVS was actually more CPU intensive than h.264, and the quality was (AT BEST) somewhat lower than even MPEG-2.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mentioned VMD format doesn't come out for the next 5 years, stores just a bit more than dual-layer DVDs, and costs many times more than Blu-Ray/HD-DVD to manufacturer.
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There were literally billions of DVD's and hundreds of millions of DVD players manufactured in China before EVD was ever born. Granted, most of those were exported, still the established base was WAY too large. Besides, no one really pays the royalties on DVD players, even here in North America. I was corrected by someone here on /. before, the royalties for every part of a DVD player* is around $25 USD. There are often DVD players retailing here for $25 USD. Do you think proper royalties are being paid?
Now, HDDVD and BlueRay are barely established... there may be a chance there.
* Philips gets a big chunk for the disc design (I think), but there are also royalties for MP3, Dolby, DivX, etc.