China’s EVD means another entrant in the battle of movie formats

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Sunday, 10 December 2006

Remember hearing about China’s proposed Enhanced Video Disc a couple of years ago? It’s baa-a-a-ack, with China wanting them to reign supreme in 2008 onwards. But can it possibly succeed? We're not so sure...

The EVD, or ‘Enhanced Video Disc’, is China’s attempt at removing the intellectual property (IP) obligations its manufacturers must pay to foreign companies for patents on DVDs. Introduced in 2003, the concept died out for a very simple reason – there was little content, few players and no-one really wanted on.

But a two or three years on, and Chinese manufacturers are getting squeezed. According to online reports, US $7 of the cost of a DVD player that sells for US $20 (at wholesale) goes to IP obligations. With the other US $12.95 (presumably) going into the cost of making a DVD player at such inexpensive prices, there’s very little fat left for Chinese manufacturers to feast upon.

The EVD is also a way for China to hopefully end the massive amount of piracy that’s present in China, although there’s little stopping existing DVD pirates from just churning out EVD pirate discs instead.

The EVD is also slated to offer high definition content by squeezing more layers onto a disc. More layers means more data without needing to go to the expensive blue lasers which are currently used in Blu-ray and HD DVD players.

Whether this new attempt by China to set up its own standards for use in a country of 1.3 billion people will succeed or not is yet to be seen. It does make some economic sense, but everyone needs to play together nicely, from the movie studios who have supposedly pledged support, to manufacturers who'll make the units, and even the pirates, if this is to succeed.

And with the costs of Blu-ray and HD DVD players set to fall in the future, EVD is a technology that may fade again, even if it costs Chinese manufacturers good money to pay for the IP.

After all, it’s consumers and the market that decides standards – it’s rarely companies or governments. But we’ll see. If anyone can make the EVD standard stick, China could do it.

Might your movie player of the future be an EVD player? Not if hard drives, broadband, bittorrent, downloads, widespread adoption of PS3s and HD DVD players have anything to do with the future.

The Chinese will have all of these to play with too, after all. Maybe EVD will end up standing for 'Extinct Video Disc'...
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