Quote Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
I'm with the Doc here, the US has two formats battling out and there isn't any room for #3. NME is on their own and it would be very difficult to get the market penetration that the other two already have. I'd have to think that wind of VMD would have gotten around to the manufacturers long ago yet they seem to be choosing BR or HD-DVD. NME would have to get movie companies on board and get retailers to stock their product. They'd have more than an up hill battle.

Also NME don't really offer any real advantage over the other 2 formats, except they claim red laser is superior to blue. I don't know if that's true or not. VMD can hold up to 100 GB but a company showed at 2007 CES a HD-DVD that can hold 150 GB. At present nothing can read all the layers of a disc like that. Actually, the movie companies aren't even using near the available storage now, so a storage race don't mean much except to maybe computer users. With Microsoft behind HD-DVD and the BDA member companies putting out BR computer products, I think even the PC market is already taken up.

The US market has already shown that pricing is not a factor so far in this war. This has me puzzled but the fact is, it's going to take more than a cheap price to get VMD into the fight. According to many published sales reports Blu-ray seems to be selling even better overseas. Bottomline, I wouldn't buy any stock in NME. My prediction is, instead of them taking over, they will fade away without a ripple in the US. They were supposed to be here in the 3rd quarter yet no one has heard of them.
I'm fishing for conspiracies here, but wasn't the Chinese government pushing their own red-laser HD disc format a while ago to try and circumvent the HD-DVD and Blu-ray royalties? This sounds an awful lot like a new variant on that concept.

If so, that would make plenty of sense since China's domestic market alone has 1.4 billion potential customers, and the VMD Wikipedia entry mentions that Bollywood titles will be among the first available in the VMD format (India contributes another 1+ billion customers, and ranks as the most prolific movie industry in the world). With just the domestic markets in China and India, this format can take off even if none of the North American and European production houses support it.

And with much of China's domestic production capacity owned by the government, they can easily mandate VMD as the home market standard for domestically produced content, and completely lock Blu-ray and HD-DVD out altogether. Toshiba has been signing up Chinese manufacturers to make off-brand HD-DVD players, but I've read speculation that the Chinese want to jettison DVD player manufacturing altogether along with the HD-DVD format in order to avoid paying royalties.

For North America, I think the only potential market for VMD would be imported content, particularly movies and TV shows from India and China if both of those countries widely adopt VMD as the HD format of choice. It's no different than how a lot of the movies from that part of the world commonly used the Video CD (VCD) format rather than VHS, and took a long time before switching a lot of the content from VCD to DVD.