This Month's DVD Media Market News.

Datawrite: This week reported back huge sales increases following a minor dye change and a major price drop on their 4x Red DVD-R. They also inform us that they have a 4x version of their Yellow DVD-R due to arrive in Europe. They claim that the 4x Yellow which will be sold alongside the Red 4x, at an albeit higher price, is produced for them by Princo at the same factory, using the same production line, as their best selling 1x Yellow DVD-R.

O1ne Optical Products: Plan to introduce a Lead Data sourced 4x Disc in the next few weeks. Lead Data appears to be an excellent choice for 01ne Optical Products. The (relatively) new start-up media company said in a press release yesterday

“Our initial offerings to the market were sourced through a UK based brand; they have proven to be very successful. We felt it was time we started sourcing product direct from manufacturers and Lead Data is the ideal strategic long term partner for us. This new alliance will allow us to sell high quality products at a more competitive price and allow us to bring products to market faster due to Lead Data’s focus on R&D.”

Editors note: Lead Data, although relatively unknown in Europe, are one of the big four DVD manufacturers in the world and at the moment oem for Sony.

Memorex: Have dipped their toe into the UK market with their release of the new Memorex 4x DVD disc. The disc is produced for Memorex by CMC.

Choice Consumables: Having previously found the competition too hot in Western Europe are in true British fashion having another go with the release of a new range of discs. At the moment we have no details of manufacturers or even range they plan to introduce. Though in Western Europe they have recently released a 4x disc that is Ritek sourced.

Prodisc: It seems Prodisc have increased the size of their production and are again shipping to Europe. Expect to see a few Prodisc 2x and 4x Discs floating about under various guises.

Bulkpaq: Our friends at Bulkpaq have, it seems, been left with egg on their faces. They grossly underestimated the size of the European market and have not shipped any media for a month because they sold out - DOH!!! It seems they have several million discs on the sea and they may well have to dramatically slash prices  to compete with the latest incarnation of the Datawrite Red (who incidentally slashed prices to take advantage of Bulkpaq’s misfortune) which is outselling every other brand in Europe at a 6:1 ratio.

No Name Manufacturers: Our sources in the industry tell us that several CD manufacturers who have been previously excluded from the European CD market (they refused to pay the Philips royalty on CD-R ) have purchased bonding machines to allow them to produce DVD-R on the former CD-R production lines. So I think we can expect a flood of new brands who will try and attempt to take market share by reducing prices 

All in all its been an exciting month with price drops and judging by whats in the pipeline its going to get even more exiting in June.