Old EVD News

The IT News blog from the China Economic Review has an entry about EVD. The entry is (at best) poorly researched. I’d expect a little more quality control from CER.

First, the entry is more or a less a carbon copy of the article on Xinhua. The only added analysis being the rather wide eyed “What will be amazing is if this takes off...”

Second, if the author had spent a few minutes with Google he could have found out that this is old news. Here, for example, is a link to an article from 2002 describing the (then) new EVD system EVD players were already introduced into the market years ago and sunk without a trace - no content. (BTW Google also shows that this entry on CER is re-produced verbatim on Bloggeroff by the same author)

Had there been a little research, a discussion on why EVD failed the first time would have been interesting. EVD failed because of a lack of content and lack of HD screens. I don’t see this changing any time soon. Hollywood is certainly not going to jump on the format second time around - all their movies are already available in China on (pirate) DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are in the market now and direct download is taking off. It would be amazing if Hollywood were to do a content deal for EVD.

Let’s look at the patent issue. If you consider the royalties as part of the cost of manufacturing then the manufacturers are selling below cost price. The price competition is totally self-inflicted. The Xinhua article claims that there are now fewer than 150 DVD player manufacturers in China because of the royalty cost. Or, put another way, there are 140 too many DVD player manufacturers in China. And there’s strong competition because of a history of price cutting going back to the VCD days.

The above argument about manufacturers going out of business because of royalties assumes the manufacturers are actually starting to pay royalties. If the current situation is the same as the past, no royalties have been paid. So the whole argument is academic.

While we’re talking about patents lets examine the claim that EVD will have lower royalties than DVD. This is totally bogus. EVD will have higher (or the same) royalties because it is a DVD player AND an EVD player. So there is the DVD royalties and the EVD royalties. Even assuming EVD is free for China manufacturers the royalties have not gone down, they’ve stayed the same.

While we’re on the subject, lets explode the myth that China can do nothing about piracy: try buying fake Beijing Olympics branded goods.