A week after Warner announced the filing of a patent for hybrid media capable of combining HD DVD, Blu-ray, and DVD layers, a British company known as New Medium Enterprises (NME) says it has developed a multi-format technology that doesn't face the same hurdles as other implementations:

The production costs of a multi-layer DVD using the new NME technology are estimated to be around 9 cents, compared with the 6 cents for a standard single-layer play-back DVD, according to Dutch company ODMS, one of the world's leading makers of production lines for optical disks. This 50 percent cost increase compares favorably with the current generation of multi-layer recordable DVD disks which cost 3 to 5 times as much to produce than a single layer disk, due to low yields.