U.K. Subsidiary Relaunches EcoDisc For ‘General Distribution’

Days after a federal judge in California threw out the EcoDisc lawsuit that alleged DVD format licensors had conspired to put the green DVD developer out of business (CED April 29 p4), EcoDisc has resurfaced in the U.K. under a new British subsidiary. That subsidiary, EcoDisc U.K., says a British replicator, Software Logistics in High Wycombe, northwest of London, has begun taking orders for the half-thickness disc, which holds the same amount of data as a DVD5.

EcoDisc was invented in 2006, “but was withheld from general U.K. distribution until quality assurance testing was complete,” EcoDisc U.K. said in a statement last week. “After considerable investment in research and development, the EcoDisc has been declared ‘fit and robust for the purposes intended’ by independent quality assurance company, Testronic Labs,” the subsidiary said. “EcoDisc was tested in more than 240 Blu-ray players, standard definition DVD players and PC and Apple Mac drives, and inspected in accordance with stringent quality criteria."

According to a Testronic test report posted at ecodisc.org.uk, more than 400 makes and models of players and drives were tested at Testronic labs in Burbank, Calif., and Hasselt, Belgium, and at an independent lab that EcoDisc hired but does not identify. Of all the models tested late last year for loading of the disc, startup time, playback, drive noise and disc ejection, only one, a Sony DVP-S315 tray-loading DVD player introduced in 1998, is listed as having failed.

Still, “templates” of the EcoDisc posted at the Web sites of ecodisc.org.uk and the technology’s only licensed U.S. replicator, U-Tech Media, of Milpitas, Calif., bear this disclaimer: “This disc is not a standard DVD, and may not operate in some drives and players.” Ecodisc.org.uk also sternly warns licensees not to put the DVD logo on an EcoDisc, though the required EcoDisc logo bears the generic description, “DVD Video."

Besides EcoDisc’s California lawsuit accusing the DVD Forum and the DVD Format Logo and Licensing Corp. of antitrust violations for warning replicators they could lose their DVD licenses for manufacturing EcoDiscs, the DVD FLLC sued U-Tech in U.S. District Court in Manhattan once it agreed to produce EcoDiscs. Before the dismissal of the California lawsuit and the settlement of the New York action, the DVD FLLC softened its tone with replicators. According to court documents in California, DVD FLLC wrote its licensed replicators last December to say it would permit them to produce EcoDiscs and other non-standard, 0.6-mm-thick discs as long as they didn’t bear the DVD logo and had the playability disclaimer printed on the disc and on any outside packaging. U-Tech remains an active EcoDisc licensee and is taking replication orders, its site says. But links on the EcoDisc site list subsidiaries only in China and Germany in addition to the affiliate in the U.K. and the headquarters in Switzerland, which didn’t respond right away to our queries about the status of a U.S. subsidiary. In court papers challenging what it called DVD Forum and DVD FLLC efforts to stamp out EcoDisc, the company said its U.S. sales agent quit last July when those tactics made it impossible to sign on new business.

Earlier manifestations of the EcoDisc were susceptible to playback problems when loaded into some Apple computer drives sourced from the Japanese OEM Matshita, EcoDisc said. The required EcoDisc logo now has 12 “Braille dots” in three sets of four positioned around the center hole of the disc. “The Braille-dots on the EcoDisc DVD ensure the correct clamping and to prevent spinning of the disc during insertion and playback,” the company says. “The dots are built up using a special varnish, which is designed to completely harden under UV lamps during the printing process. As the dots are translucent they blend in with your label artwork. Instructions on the exact positioning of the dots are part of the label template."

Since an EcoDisc DVD consists of only one 0.6-mm-thick layer of polycarbonate instead of the two bonded polycarbonate layers of a conventional DVD, the EcoDisc is not only thinner and lighter, but also requires only half the energy to produce, its developers say. Producing an EcoDisc DVD emits 52 percent less CO2 than a DVD5 and it requires no toxic bonders to stick the two layers together, which makes it fully recyclable, they say. And since EcoDisc DVDs are only half the weight of conventional DVDs, they offer substantial CO2 emission reductions in shipping and transportation, they say.

The EcoDisc DVD is available only in a 4.7 GB capacity, the same as a DVD5, the developers say. “The most widely used applications of DVD5 are promotional, educational, children’s, enterprise, government, IT bundling, newspaper and magazine cover-mounts,” they say. “All these applications together cover about 70 percent of the market. The typical Hollywood movies with bonus material, various language tracks etc., need the 8.5GB capacity of the DVD9 with two data layers. The EcoDisc DL (Dual Layer) is currently under development and a concept is likely to be introduced during 2010."

Software Logistics has fielded “a lot of interest in EcoDisc” the last few months, Ray Wheeler, the replicator’s sales director, told us in an e-mail. For example, Future Publishing, the U.K.’s largest magazine publisher, is converting all its DVD5 promotional discs to EcoDisc, Wheeler said. “But it’s not just the companies who give away free promotional discs who are adopting to this new format,” he said. There’s also interest among software houses that are starting to adopt EcoDisc for their anti-virus products, he said.