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."

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...