LONDON , April 4, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- New Medium Enterprises, Inc. (NME) (OTCBB:NMEN) today announces an agreement with a leading replication house, Dubai-based Planet Optical Disc (POD). The deal ensures that POD is the Middle East's first HD VMD replicator. Replication will be provided for the Sub-continent as well.
Set up in 1999, POD was the first Optical Disc replicator in the Middle East and remains the region's premier facility offering comprehensive manufacturing service which includes authoring, mastering, printing, packaging and replicating CD, DVD, CD-R and DVD-R formats.
The Middle East has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world and the HD VMD will be part of this rapidly developing region. Year on year growth predicts the demand of pre-recorded DVD and CD to reach 2 billion between the Middle East and Africa. POD has been the catalyst that provided the growth impetus to the entire region and its adoption of the HD format will ensure it remains at the forefront of its business.
Chairman of POD, Subhash Dudani says, "As we were the first optical disc replicators in the Middle East region we will maintain that leading position for HD VMD technology as well. Whilst it is cost-effective for mass production the quality is not compromised and is in fact excellent and this suits our standards perfectly."
For NME, the deal represents another string to its bow for a strong global replication network following its recent signing with a disc manufacturer in Russia, Bars Media Group, where NME and ODMS will initially supply 12 lines over a three year period.
Mass production of the HD VMD solution at a price within reach of the world's consumers has already been assured by other top optical disc industry leaders such as Axxicon (Netherlands), DaTARIUS (Austria), Dr. Schenk GmbH (Germany), Netstal Maschinen AG (Switzerland), Plasmon OMS (France) and VDL Groep (Netherlands).
NME Global Marketing Director, Optical Division, Sanjay Khar comments, "Our VMD solution does offer the optical industry a more affordable HD solution and we are extremely delighted in forging an alliance with such an impressive manufacturing partner as POD."
Notes to editors:
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 based on existing DVD industrial infrastructure.
NME's patented 2P process succeeded in solving the technological problems which have limited DVD's to two information layers (DVD9). Thus, multilayering is now possible with HD VMD's commercial solution of 20 GB storage capacity for single sided discs (i.e. 4 layers of 5 GB each). HD VMD has also proven to achieve 24, 30, 40 and 48 GB capacity with the NME 2P process method. The NME 2P process is also applicable for manufacturing multilayer blue laser discs.
The HD VMD (disc) has a capacity to playback a full three hours of true 1080p High Definition material on one single side. The HD VMD (player) is also backward compatible and supports all existing DVD discs formats and CD, in addition to allowing consumers to play their existing standard-definition DVD collections up-converted to HD.
HD VMD 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 prices is very close to DVD current pricing and costs and is considered a serious challenger as it provides access to High Definition at a much lower cost than Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives and discs.
About NME
New Medium Enterprises HD VMD format and players provides the world's first low-cost and true high-definition playback solution utilizing today's red laser technology and existing DVD industrial infrastructure. Incorporating break-through optical storage capacity, a red laser-based HD file format, encryption technology, authoring tools and compression technologies, NME is providing the only high-quality and high-value offering for the discerning consumer electronics market. New Medium Enterprises, Inc. is listed on the OTC exchange in the U.S. under the ticker symbol (NMEN) and on Yahoo Financial website as (NMEN.OB). For additional information about NME, please visit http://www.nmeinc.com.
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