Wednesday, September 27, 2006
British Firm Develops Process to Produce Dual-Format HD Discs
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "NEWS" @ 12:15 PM
"Britain-based New Medium Enterprises said on Tuesday it had solved a technical production problem that makes it possible to produce a cheap multiple-layer DVD disc containing one film in different, competing formats. "Current technologies to create multiple-layer discs mostly don't work. We've created a technology for mass production of multiple layers that does not suffer from the well known problem of low yields," said NME Chief Technology Officer Eugene Levich. A low yield means that many DVDs coming off the manufacturing lines are not working and have to be discarded. The production costs of a multi-layer DVD using the new NME technology are estimated to be around 9 cents, compared with the 6 cents for a standard single-layer play-back DVD, according to Dutch company ODMS, one of the world's leading makers of production lines for optical discs."
While this is a great technological breakthrough, unfortunately making dual format discs will only be the smallest hurdle. The biggest is licensing them. I suspect the HD DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums will do something to make these discs financially unfeasible, by driving the licensing fees up so high as to price them out of the market. That's unfortunate.
While this is a great technological breakthrough, unfortunately making dual format discs will only be the smallest hurdle. The biggest is licensing them. I suspect the HD DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums will do something to make these discs financially unfeasible, by driving the licensing fees up so high as to price them out of the market. That's unfortunate.
