New Medium Enterprises, developer of the versatile multilayer disc (VMD), and Beijing E-world Technology, developer of China's own version of the next-generation Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) standard – who joined forces in November last year (read story) – have announced the Spring launch of the VMD/EVD-HD player at CeBIT in March.

Beijing E-World CTO Xu Xiang said that "the two companies have achieved total compatibility between the EVD–HD player and VMD discs. All parties involved are very satisfied with this prototype and are confident to start commercial production in early spring."

As an important show of support for the cooperation between NME and Beijing E-world, a leading Bollywood film distributor Eros will release five titles in HD on VMD together with the EVD–HD player at the CeBIT exhibition in March.

NME and Beijing E-world technological teams have been cooperating with each other extensively during the past several months. The two companies had launched their VMD/EVD-HD player prototype before Christmas in 2005, and plan to launch the commercial production in the first quarter of 2006.

“We believed it was important to continue the integration of our two technologies, as well as gain strong assistance, technical support and input from Chinese DVD manufacturers prior to the launch of our products. We now believe that we have all the necessary support from the Chinese DVD player manufacturers to launch the HD solution at the German show in March 2006,” said Mahesh Jayanarayan, CEO of NME.

NME is positioning itself as a technology leader in the field of high definition digital storage. NME is offering the film, entertainment, video gaming and storage industries a total solution including thwarting video piracy. The Versatile Multilayer Disc format the company developed is a technologically advanced red laser optical storage disc that has capacities ranging from 20 to 40GB. The technology has the capability of up to 100GB of data storage, which is 20 fold the capacity of existing DVD discs.

Beijing E-World Technology, a Chinese publicly listed company, is engaged in the development of electronic chip and board technology. E-world is also the developer of the Enhanced Versatile Disc standard, which is currently selling in China, and one of the world’s HD optical storage discs.

Story filed 01.01.06