Copy-Protected Digital VHS

DragonMagic writes: "BBC carries this story regarding the comeback, certain studios hope, of the video tape against the dominating sales of the DVD. Fox, Universal, Dreamworks SKG and Artisan Entertainment are releasing a series of blockbuster movies onto the format D-VHS, developed by JVC. DVHS offers High Definition TV technology and the possibility of copy prevention, and is able to play old VHS tapes as well."

Comments

Ask yourself this.....

[ajs]

Studios should be asking themselves, "who are your early adopters?"

DVD is too new for your average consumer to want to run out and buy a new player (even if it plays VHS too).

High-end videophiles will know better. Random access media has too much going for it in terms of non-linear content (think "the making of" and trailers) and fast search forward or back. They also know that tape involves more moving parts, and thus more wear.

So, they've got to be targeting the low-end videophiles who know just enough to be dangerous. Oddly enough, the vast majority of THAT market segment are college students or recent graduates, and would be the most likely to be turned off by the new copy-protection features!

Oh yeah, this is going to be lucky to go as far as DIVX (the DVD format, not the video codec) did. ;-)

Re:Some cool features

[gwernol]

For some people, the 50 hours/tape feature may be exciting. That's about 70 hours of TV if you cut out the commericals.

As we know from the non-consumer electronics world (i.e. computers) tape is a great archive mechanism but is lousy for random access. The problem with putting 70 hours of TV onto a digital tape is that I rarely want to watch 70 hours of back-to-back TV shows. More likely I'll want to find that kicking episode of Buffy that's somewhere on the tape. I don't want to have to play through 35 hours of other things to find it.

So although 70 hours of TV on a single tape sounds appealing, in practice I suspect that this format is going to lose out to recordable DVD technologies.