Our take...
The poor sales are in stark contrast to the bullish expectations of EVD developer Beijing E-World in December 2006, when it was one of 40 Chinese companies setting up the EVD Alliance to compete with the Hollywood and Japanese back hi-def fomats. This followed the establishment of a joint venture between Beijing E-world and UK-based New Medium Enterprises (NME) earlier that year that planned to use NME's HD VMD multilayer approach to increase EVD's capacity and allow it to compete with other high definition formats. China has long argued that the cost of royalty fees to foreign patent holders on technologies such as DVD has reduced profit margins so much that domestic manufacturers struggle to compete with foreign counterparts in the local DVD hardware market. For this reason, China has consistently developed its own video technologies, including Super VCD (SVCD) in 1998, DVCD (a combination of DVD and VCD) in 1999, and Advanced Video Dics (AVD) in 2001, none of which ever achieved real success. Ironically, local reports indicate that the lack of dedicated software for China's EVD and Taiwan's FVD, means that not only have the two formats been made mutually compatible to increase their appeal, but most manufacturers have also resorted to ensuring their players also play standard DVDs, thus making them liable for the same royalty payments they were originally created to avoid.