NEW EDIG

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China Launches its Own DVD Standard, Seeks Patents

China, which made 30 million DVD players last year, is flexing its own high-tech muscles by launching a new standard for video on optical disks called EVD for Enhanced Versatile Disk. The new standard, if China gains enough users, would help it in two ways. It would avoid paying royalties on DVD patents to foreign organizations and it could potentially rake in royalties from foreign firms if the EVD format proves popular outside China. The Chinese government said it would "attack the market share of DVDs." China makes about 60% of the world's DVD players according to Vamsi Sistla, senior analyst with Allied Business Intelligence.

Two unanswered questions remain, however:

1.Will EVD help protect content from piracy? China has promised to eradicate intellectual property theft since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The EVD announcement didn't mention the piracy issue.

2.Will the studios, specifically the American ones, permit their content to be distributed on EVDs?

China's State Trade and Economic Commission and its Ministry of Information Industry has sponsored the development of the high-definition compression format since it began in 1999. Beijing E-World Technology Company did most of the work. It used video compression technologies that it licensed from US-based On2 Technologies. The consortium that nominally developed the EVD technology has applied for 25 patents, seven have been granted. Forty more are in the queue. Strange behavior for a country that openly permits pirated DVDs and CDs to be sold in its street markets.

The Chinese government says that EVD players will sell for about $240. The cost should drop as production volumes increase. A DVD player made in China sells for about $85.

The Communist Party newspaper the People's Daily said last month that EVD will let domestic disc-player makers "shake off their previous dependence on foreign technologies."

China missed the VHS videotape era. Its primary method for storing video is currently VCDs, video recorded on CDs. VCDs are lower in quality than DVDs, more like VHS-quality. DVDs are considered the high end of the market in China.
Video Technology Evolution