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."

Comments

This story is a startling contrast to this one ...

[bestinshow]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/07/china_unve ils_54_evd_players/

The pitch now is that EVD will not be an alternative to DVD but its successor - essentially it's been repositioned as an alternative to HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Technology provided by London-based New Media Enterprises, which has been touting a format it calls VMD (Versatile Multi-layer Disc), to provided a storage capacity sufficient for HD content but read using standard red lasers rather than blue.

To get it there, some 20 CE vendors yesterday unveiled 54 EVD players, China's Xinhau state news agency reports. Among the suppliers were the Haier Group, one of the world's biggest white-goods makers, and TCL Group, which manufactures kit for France's Thomson, owner of the RCA brand.

Is any one suprised?

[Thansal]

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?

Re:Is any one suprised?

[stoolpigeon]

That's remarkable. A debate begun and settled in a single sentence. So it is all about IP.

Re:If it's just encoding...

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

The poster above alludes to it but just to reiterate, a hybrid player will cost the same as a normal DVD player (since it has to have the same licensing costs of the normal DVD, not to mention potentially extra hardware and support for the combination). So what's the incentive for a consumer to buy the hybrid (at the same or potentially higher cost) when DVD players are more readily available (with even steeper cost decline curves)? Furthermore, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are just around the corner so there will be even less incentive to go with an intermediate (ie. temporary) solution until those take off... China has to be given credit for how it is opening up its markets and (hopefully) liberalizing itself (on social/political issues). However, the country is still influenced too much by nationalists who want to have their own standard in everything. How many stories have we had on Slashdot on China's own specs on things ranging from mobile/wirless phones to CPUs (whatever happend to the Red Dragon or whatever it was called anyway), to you name it. It remains to be seen when this totalitarian mindset of having control over everything in the nation will come to an end...

Why would they bother?

[Kadin2048]

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.