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Shenzhen Companies to Set up MP4 Standard
(China IT Watch Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)SHENZHEN, Feb 21, 2006 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) --China's MP4 industry standard will be licked into shape by June 2006, if everything goes smoothly.
On October 27, the PMP (portal media player) Committee was co-founded by 26 MP4 manufacturers in Shenzhen, the special economic zone in Southeastern China's Guangdong Province.
China's MP4 market increased by as much as 300% last year. It is predicted in local media that the MP4 market value will reach CNY 10 billion in the next few years.
Insiders close to the committee disclose that the PMP Committee will put its full weight behind the Chinese government to come up with an industry standard for MP4 player in the months ahead.
Looking back on the history of MP3 player, the Chinese MP3 player market was tousled by low-quality low-price products just due to the absence of an industry standard.
"That was a tragedy, a group of good MP3 brands have been priced out of the market by the low-price strategy carried out by some unlicensed small and mid-sized MP3 player makers, so we do not want to replay the tragedy" says Zhang Yaling, general manager of Archos Asia." Archos is one of the most active advocators of MP4 player industry standard.
As some MP4 frontrunners are brewing the industry standard, the MP4 player market has already slid into confusion.
In some big cities such as Guangzhou, price wars have been triggered in the MP4 player market. Lowest price of some layers now has reached CNY 500, which are selling like hot cakes.In some online stores, difference between prices of high-end and low-end MP4 players is huge. The highest can be CNY 7,000 or CNY 8,000, and lowest can hit CNY 600.
An MP4 reseller in Guangzhou Tianhe PC Supermarket says that at the moment MP4 players come mainly in two types, the hard-disk MP4 players and flash-memory MP4 players. And prices of MP4 players have been going down since the flash-memory products debuted in early this year.
Currently, the flash-memory MP4 players account for as much as 80 percent of the market, most of which are produced by original MP3 player makers in Guangdong Province.
Quality of MP4 player is depending on good chips. However, a lot of MP4 player makers are using low-end chips in a bid to reduce costs. In point of fact, sub-CNY 1000 MP4 products are just MP3 players with video function.
In such case, Archos, Sharp, Shenzhen-based Inforally, and many other MP4 player makers gathered in Shenzhen with an eye to form an industry standard.
Most of 300 MP3 player makers in Southern China, which sprang up during the past few years, have been closed down due to fierce competition and narrow profits.
So far a large number of Chinese MP3 player makers have shift to other business such as production of keyboard, mouse, speaker, and so force, with about 100 MP3 makers still struggling to find a way out.
As most MP3 players quit, the rest are seeking ways and means to stay on board. Some MP3 player makers are considering moving to MP4 player production, but after years' development China's MP4 market is still in its infancy. MP4 players so far have not been accepted by Chinese consumers.
MPEG-4 is the global multimedia standard, delivering professional-quality audio and video streams over a wide range of bandwidths, from cell phone to broadband and beyond.
MPEG-4 was defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the working group within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that specified the widely adopted, Emmy Award-winning standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. Hundreds of researchers around the world contributed to MPEG-4, which was finalized in 1998 and became an international standard in 2000 and included in QuickTime in 2002.
(USD 1 = CNY 8.07)
From Guangzhou Daily, Page 1, Monday, February 20, 2006
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