Just as consumers are becoming aquainted with Blu Ray and HD DVD, and enthusiasts are taking sides, another format comes striding along. The format is called HD VMD and stands for "High Definition, Versatile Multilayer Disc." As with the other formats, you need a HD VMD player which like HD DVD is based of current DVD technology. The company behind it is NME inc (New medium Enterprises), and hope to take Sony and Toshiba head-on. The press release below goes into detail about the format, but as far as support, it seems that Bollywood Indian movie studios seem to be the primary supporters. I won't speculate, but I think we all know how we feel about a third HD movie format. Check it out for yourself:
LONDON, March 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- New Medium Enterprises, Inc.
(NME), (OTC Bulletin Board: NMEN) bringing affordable HD home entertainment across the globe, has secured a partnership deal with AP and Eagle Entertainment, two of India's leading content distributors. The deal will enable consumers to be entertained in style with an HD VMD bundle box set to include a unique HD player plus 10 top selling movie titles at a competitive price of $349 to be available from June 2007. At the forefront of HD technology, NME has developed Versatile Multilayer Disc (HD VMD), a proprietary format and technology, which allows true HD content playback using multilayered discs and drives which are fully backward compatible with existing CD and DVD formats. HD VMD is the only HD disc that uses today's DVD infrastructure and its added advantage is that consumers can use their existing DVD film collection and enter into the HD VMD market at their own pace. In this sense, HD VMD is a natural extension of DVD, utilizing the remarkable potential of the DVD industrial
infrastructure.
Highly acclaimed films such as Boys, starring Anabe Vaa, Indian, starring Kamal Hashan, Jeans, starring Aishwira Rai and Hanuman and Water are part of the content portfolio between these two companies. "This is a timely and exciting partnership, considering we are launching our products in Mumbai in the summer of this year. The Indian community already demonstrated that they are gadget and technology savvy and we anticipate large interest in our products in terms of our competitive retail price and unique technology," comments Uti Thakkar, Head of the Asian Division. A combination of 494 films were released last year produced from the Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam and Kannada regions making the South Indian film industry a worthy and ready market to receive HD VMD products.
About HD VMD. What you should know about HD VMD.
HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) is NME's proprietary High Definition disc format based upon established red laser technology enabling seamless and cost effective manufacturing solutions for High Definition products. NME's patented 2P process succeeded in solving the phenomenon which has limited DVD's to two layers. Thus, multilayering is now possible with HD VMD solution capable of storage capacity of 20 GB (i.e. 4 layers of 5 GB each). HD VMD has also proven to achieve 24, 30, 40 and 48 GB capacity with the 2P process method. Furthermore, HD VMD is a true HD 1080p format and is compatible with all HD-compatible screens and supports every existing disks format including; CD, DVD (DVD5 & DVD9).
HD VMD format is currently being adopted by content providers and distributors in 12 regions worldwide, including Brazil, Central Europe, China, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Scandinavia, Middle East, Russia and the United States. HD VMD is considered as a serious challenger, as it allows access to High Definition at a lower cost than Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives and discs available today on the market. HD VMD prices are very close to DVD current pricing.
1 Comment:
HD VMD sounds optimistic - -- But I think the technology while being great needs the backing of big Companies like Microsoft or some Japanese giants for HD VMD to really steal the show and win the FORMAT WAR. Good luck to the warriors of HD VMD!
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