It's Monday, which apparently means time for yet another Blu-ray fighting Chinese high definition disc format, this time NVD. With
China Blue HD barely out the door and
EVD conspicuous only in its absence, HD NVD players apparently went on sale today in Wuhan, featuring 12GB of storage on a red laser disc format that -- unlike the Toshiba technology backed CBHD / HD DVD variant -- is not only
Made in China, but Created in China, with the hope that owning their own IP can net 4-5 times the profit for its manufacturers. 80% of the world's DVDs and players are reportedly produced in China, so now production lines can switch to NVD HD cheaply -- stop us if you've heard this
before. It's clear that these companies are chafing under the royalties of foreign tech, but until we hear something about content support in any major way, it's hard to believe this format war is even worth fighting. Us? We're still holding out for
VCDHD.
Read - NVD: independent innovation to safeguard national economic security
Read - China's proprietary red-ray NVD makes its debut
posted Feb 2nd 2009 4:32PM
If CBHD isn't going to get momentum, why would this?
A red laser HD format might have gotten traction three or four years ago, but right now blue-violent isn't a barrier any more. The issue with CBHD wasn't that it was expensive to make, it was that studios weren't going to support it. And there's no reason to suppose that's false for any of the other formats either.
Short of a large government actually banning competing formats, there's no chance any competing technologies will gain any traction right now, even given Blu-ray has turned out to be such a trainwreck.
Blu-ray a "trainwreck". Yeah right...BS!
memo to China:
Just move along and develop high capacity solid state drives. Blu-ray is the last of the spinny disk physical format and there is no use in trying to compete with it for now. just come up with a ssd with over 10tb capacity and create the next format, a combo downloading and physical format with enough space to imporve on Blu-rays quality.
The article seems to be classical Chinese propaganda.
For instance it states: "Each DVD produced in China requires a patent fee of 18 USD".
Obviously these people either have a very strange exchange rate between Chinese currency and USD or this is total BS. 18$ per DVD produced?
The full quote is:
Although over 80 percent of all DVD products in the current global market are produced in China, all DVD core technologies and patents are held by foreign enterprises. Each DVD produced in China requires a patent fee of 18 USD, making profitability very low
From that, and the broken English, I infer they're talking about DVD players, not DVD discs. $18 per DVD player in patent royalties doesn't sound completely unlikely.
You may be right on that one. Sounds more likely.
I still feels it's a wee bit of propaganda/sales talk though. No studios (except possibly Chinese ones) would support this format. So their only market could then be China.
So if they want to make a profit out of this it would be on the home market. Not very likely that they would make much more profit out of that.
WOW 12GB, that almost like a ... DVD 9 !!!1
As far as I know, they don't have any patents in channel technologies. Probably, they just decreased the track pitch of a standard DVD without changing anything else. 12GB is based on double-layer disc. That means 6GB/layer, which is not a very big improvement on capacity.
And I don't think they will establish a new standard like Blu-ray or CBHD. They must not make NVD players incompatible from DVD standard (they still have to pay the loyalty). They just includes this tech as an additional function in their DVD players. This function might add some price or attract (cheat) some customers. It is enough for they to make just several tens of NVD titles to cheat customers to buy NVD players.
To: freighttrain2126
I don't think SSD+downloading will be ready to substitute optical disc in short term. You know that it takes only 3.5 seconds (even less in future) to make a double layer HD DVD disc with a movie of 30GB on it. Fast duplication and low cost is the advantage of read only optical disc, that is useful for movie publication.
hahahahaha.... i can't stop laughing at this!!! This is so Chinese! Always trying to prove something that's already proven! I say this because I run the R&D department for a sports equipment manufacturer (Taiwanese) based in Shenzhen, China and I deal with people like that all the time. This is like declaring to enter the format war when the war has clearly ended. Yes, you have entered the war BUT, this is not the same war. On the other hand... if they want to start a new HD format within China that's a whole different story and strategy. China currently has a piracy ratio of 85%! If all of those regional piracy firms team up to use this new format, then they'll have that huge piracy market all to themselves... essentially this would mean the usual sub $1 dvd's jacked up to maybe $5 max.... still very cheap but in terms of profit margins that's an instant 5 fold gain! They have the power to force consumers into buying their format by releasing every pirated movies in that format leaving them with no choice.