R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

Third format enters HD fray

VMD player costs just $150 but looks to Bollywood rather than Hollywood - for now

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World 10 Mar 2006

A third technology for high-definition storage emerged at Cebit today to complicate even further the battle between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD camps.

New Medium Enterprises (NME) is pushing a format called Versatile Multi-layer Disc that stores up to 40GB per disc using the same low-cost red lasers used in standard DVD drives.

It is selling a player for $150, compared to $499 charged by Toshiba for its low-end HD-DVD player and around $1,000 for the first-generation Blu-ray drives.

As the name suggests, MVD uses multi-layer recording and there are 20GB, 30GB and 40GB discs on show at the NME stand. But spokesman Alexander Bolger-Hagerty said 100GB VMD recording had been achieved in the lab.

NME is US-owned, but based in London, and is in the process of a merger with a company called E-World which owns a standard called EVS. This, according to Bolger-Hagerty, is the only HD standard in China and is backed by the Chinese government. NME owns the higher (1900 by 1080 resolution) standard.

Bolger-Hagerty said: 'The excellent thing about our technology is that, because it is multi-layer, it can be adapted to blue laser when blue laser becomes more affordable.'

This is of course also true of other HD standards. Sony claims to have a 200GB eight layer disk in its labs.

But NME is not trying to compete with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats head on. It claims to have 2,600 Bollywood titles, via a distributor called Eros, and about 300 Chinese film titles through E-World.

Bolger-Hagerty said NME’s situation was 'almost like David and Goliath. We have to start somewhere and we have signed up Bollywood and the Chinese markets, the two largest markets in the world.'

But he said it might sell to the large Indian communities in cities like London and New York and might launch in a couple of major western markets once encryption issues had been settled with Hollywood. It also planned to bring out a VMD burner.

There are precedents for Eastern countries adopting technologies that fail to make an impact in the West. Movies are commonly sold on CDs in VCD format in the Far East, but VCDs never took off here.

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