SDMI And Manufacturing Fallout

An Anonymous Coward writes "Just read that some hardware manufacturers are starting to get impatient about the approal of the SDMI encyrption method since it delays their products from going to market. Thus, this causes lost market opportunity and sales due to the delay. See the EETimes story."

Comments

SDMI is Today's SET

[pbryan]

Anyone remember the Secure Electronic Transaction initiative? This was Visa's and MasterCard's magic technology to allow secure transactions on the insecure Internet. They warned those doing electronic commerce with plain ol' SSL that SSL was just a short-term kludge until SET was finalized and implemented.

It turned out that those who were going to have to actually implement SET revolted against this initiative as they realized the implications of the full implemnetation. Furthermore, SET wound up being bogged-down in bureaucratic procedure, much as SDMI is now.

What continues to surprise me about SDMI is the continued insistance that the Emperor has clothes. Just as CSS was subverted, so shall SDMI. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of mathematical fact.

Bottom line: if the watermark is audible, then it degrades the quality of the audio; if the watermark is inaudible, then it can be compressed out. So the choice will be "protect" the music with an audible watermark, or have the "protection" subverted.

Re:Becoming more common?

[radja]

you're right.. look at what's happening with DVD players.. here in the netherlands, almost no player is sold with region-codes enabled..

//rdj

Becoming more common?

[innocent_white_lamb]

We may see more of this in the future. I hope that we do, frankly.

When someone sees that his market share is being eroded or stolen away by someone whose product is "non-compliant" but which works fine and when "compliant" hardware becomes too limiting for the average consumer and the machine of choice becomes the non-compliant product, well the nature of the market is that the non-compliant hardware will take over and push the compliant hardware out.

People may be dumb, but they are not stupid, overall. There are, for example, an awful lot of CD players in the world, and a lot of audio CD's have been sold. Audio CD's took over from the LP record because there were clear advantages to the music purchasing public - improved sound quality, smaller physical format, and better durability. Not to mention ease of track-switching, etc.

However, when the only "improvement" is to restrict the customers' ability to actually use the equipment (regardless of whether the use is "appropriate" in the view of the content provider) then there will be (hopefully) consumer resistance to that kind of a change.

This is a good thing, in my opinion. And in-fighting and disagreement among those who are trying to devise the restrictive specifications can only be beneficial to the consumer. The longer it takes for a restrictive "standard" to be developed, the more firmly entrenched the existing non-restricted standard becomes. And then you get into the situation where Joe Customer says, "What do you mean I can't do X? Screw that, I'm sticking with what I have."

So my reaction to this article, overall, is "Carry on boys, by all means."