Taiwan's Advanced Optical Storage Research Alliance plans to form an alliance with the China Audio & Video Association (CAVA) and the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) to promote the compatibility of FVD, Taiwan's self-developed DVD standard, with EVD a China-developed DVD standard. Citing information provided by Der-ray Huang, the chairman of AOSRA, Digitimes.com reports that the alliance will promote FVD players in the China market, and CAVA and CAIA may select FVD over EVD because there are controversies about the adoption of EVD among makers in China.

With a working team to be set up at the end of this month, the alliance will be established in January of 2006 at the earliest.

To make FVD more competitive, AOSRA has signed with Microsoft Taiwan to adopt Microsoft's DRM (digital rights management) technology. Viewing that India has a strong movie production industry, AOSRA will intensively promote FVD players in the India market next year. Microsoft had showed its interest to cooperate with Taiwanese software and hardware companies to jointly promote the FVD format.

FVD players are currently available for sale in Taiwan only, with an estimated sales volume of 100,000 players for this year. Through sales promotion in the US and Europe, the global sales volume of FVD players is expected to rise to three million units in 2006 and to five million in 2007.