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Bill Gates Speaks Out Against Next-Gen DVDs
jZnat writes "Although we all know that Microsoft hates Blu-Ray, Bill Gates doesn't seem to like HD-DVD either. Primarily, it seems, because Mr. Gates believes media storage on hard drives is likely to be the default standard sooner rather than later. From the interview: 'Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [MPAA] got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.'"
Is an interesting idea, but, for it too work there has to be a distorbution system in place, that means high bandwidth. I think disks will be around a lot longer then mr. Gates thinks.
I hate to admit it but, I actually agree w/ Billy on this one...
Come on. 60 gigs in less space than a twinkie. I cant see this prognostication being that far off, except that its ironic he makes claims about being anti-consumer while pushing his own flavor of DRM down our throats. *sigh*
I'm a little tea pot.
While Bill Gates talks about how content should be hard drive based, The ITMS actually lets you buy epsisodes of lost for $2.
If you are going to make a format irrelevant, provide a viable alternative Bill.
What? Bill Gates thinks that the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer? Is this the same Bill Gates who is responsible for the copy protection schema for Windows XP?
As for the Redmond round table: I just realized that every time I hear Microsoft open it's mouth these days, it's complaining or unhappy about something. Is this what a mastodon sounds like as it sinks into a tar pit?
So...confused...don't know which evil to side with...
It is true that organizations are looking at blu-ray only to hedge their bets. Blu-ray can easily prevent people from properly using the format - it is loaded with an unprecidented amount of "control" technology that can be used to target or knock out particular hardware or software products. If I were a hardware or software vendor, I'd be very concerned about blu-ray. As a consumer, I'd be only more concerned - what if the disc I buy rejects my player or computer or software package? Instead of one simple standard like the classic CD, suddenly there are thousands of incompatibilities, all with the name "blu-ray". Crazy! I can foresee the side panel of blu-ray box, with a technology compatibility list 100 lines long. This is not what we need.
As a system that is loaded with patents and license agreements, you can bet that blu-ray will be well supported by industry licensees until the key patents start to expire. Then you can expect a mass-exodus to a new, yet unnamed "standard" that has more patent protection. Given the most of the patents involved are 3-10 years old, give Blu-Ray a 10 year life.
Funny how he was riding the HD-DVD parade all the way up until Warner Bros jumped ship this week, spelling pretty much the death of the format. Now, he's all about direct digital distribution? Sure optical media is going the way of the dodo, but Gates is very much flop-flopping here.
Too expensive.
Let's face it: For distributable media, people don't care about RW capabilities.
That's where next-gen recordable media comes in.
He is right in his view that the MPAA will back blue ray because of the anticonsumer copy protection in the format.
He is also right when he says that people is increasingly storing stuff in hard drives because they are competitive on the price per dollar side and they are much more reliable than the easily scratched current recordable DVDs.
He is mostly wrong about a lot of other stuff, but I have to give him this one.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Maybe. At this time there's still a factor of 100 or so difference in price/byte and a big performance differenc, too. Flash is great for portability but it has a long way to go before being the method of choice for archival storage of videos. Hard drive is already there.
Its DRM is Java-based.
Bill Gates can speak out against whatever he wishes. Until he considers who his audience is, it won't do very much.
The distributers of media want a format that is not-alterable. That way, there's not even the discussion of loss of data / corruption of data in transit. The consumers want a format that is not-alterable. If I buy a movie, I don't want to find that it's been "modified" rendering it useless, or worse yet, partially useful.
Sure, there is a market for downloading movies onto a hard drive, but realistically, hard drives fail, and I'll want a backup. DVD's may not be the best technology in the world, but it comes with a built-in feature, it is read-only. I don't want to be saddled with the responsibility for determining the validity of burnt DVDs, because I really can't do that for all of the films I intend to own. Especially when the previous expectation is for the PRODUCER of the content to produce copies of it for my consumption.
Any technology that is read-write could be overwritten, which isn't a pretty thought to consider when you just paid for the CONTENT on the media.
He may be Bill Gates, but I think he's right this time.
*ducks under the table*
I wonder how CD player and disk sales are doing? Last I heard both were flat or declining. Once people realized that they wanted their music on an iPod, the CD became an added hassle. The same process will occur with DVDs.
But DVDs won't die for 10-20 years because some collectors will be willing to pay handsomely for the "Extended Platinum Director's Super Secret Cut Anniversary Re-release edition with matching book-ends." What will occur is that fewer B-list titles will appear on DVD because video-on-demand/pay-per-view/download services will offer a larger play list with lower distribution costs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use their full dual-layer storage capacities of 50GB and 30GB respectively. Now, the largest currently available 3.5" internal HDD is 500 GB. Presently that would mean a maximum of ~10 Blu-Ray movies or ~16 HD-DVD movies. This is not a lot considering I counted over 200 DVDs on my shelf, making over the 500GB alone.
Another mentioned problem is distribution. The largest "widely" available download speeds available from Verizon via FIOS (which I will admit is not that widely available), is 30 Mbps. Now assuming you get the peak download speeds, we are talking about downloading 400,000 Mb or 240,000 Mb depending on the media. This would result in download times of 3 to 4 hours for Blu-Ray type media and of 2 to 3 hours for HD-DVD Media. On the more standard 6 Mbps connection these times would be nearly 5x larger. I think I can get to Best Bu,y Circuit City, or some other store and home in about 30 minutes tops. You have to remember a great number of consumers still pay for convenience, even in DVD purchases.
I think the hard drive storage Bill is hoping for is a pipe dream, unless of course he is planning on HDDs becoming so cheap you can sell a movie on one and then just pop it into your "player" and let it go...but HDDs are so big, and they do come with a host of their own problems...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Ars Technica goes Inside Microsoft's decision to back HD DVD http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/mi crosoft-hd-dvd.ars
Bluray fires back
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050929/sfth060.html?.v =32
Microsoft Responds
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050929-5366 .html
The conceptualization of a "disk" where you can read and write frequently at relative high speed doesn't change whether it's HD based, flash based, internet based or hologram based. I'm sure Gates still wants a file to be DRM'ed to death, he must make sure that MS are the gatekeepers.
Still. Cryptographic locks are potentially very interesting features for securing content, assessing authorship. Paraphrasing Linus: "_real_ men just upload their important stuff encrypted on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it". You're not really putting up stuff on ftp, but who knows what can be accessed without your explicit approval/knowledge. Preemptively act as if that was the case. Contrary to material properties, information is very resilient and durable. The only downsides are that it can be lost in an instant (hence the need for redundancy and backups) and can be disclosed in an innoportune fashion (hence the need for cryptographic protection).
As we embark (on the inevitable) road to making information a full-fledged property, we need to make sure all the usual ingredients of a property are present. Some will say that instead of trying to fit information in the usual definition of (material) property, we should instead enlarge and refine the definition of property. Sure, that doesn't invalidate the fact that we want to be able to protect and lock down information properties. What I guess I'm saying is that a property has attributes that are requisite for trade and that since our civilization is mostly built on that (and some form of democracy), any new property will have to incorporate those attributes we have come to rely upon.
Bill Gates doesn't care that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use restrictive, anti-customer technologies. After all, Gates is that one who's letting Hollywood studios design the high-powered DRM in Windows Vista. He's the one crippling media playback on non-approved PC peripherals.
What Gates mostly cares about, I'll bet, is that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD keep your data chained to another vendor's disc. Microsoft could have a few problems with this; after all, the inability to back up or rip discs will make Windows look like a second-rate OS, while Linux will undoubtedly end up with open source DRM-cracking tools. Gates would rather keep your data locked into your Windows installation. That way, Microsoft-approved devices like the Xbox will work with it, but non-approved devices like the iPod won't.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Every time something he doesn't like (for whatever reason) starts to gain prominence, he makes comments like this in an attempt to freeze the market and play the White Knight with an alternative that is really, REALLY bad for consumers, but much better for him.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
'Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [MPAA] got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.'
Yes Mr Stallman, but I think that this sort of thing is bound to happen whatever you...Bill who said what?
"'Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [MPAA] got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.'"
Translation: ANY version of DRM where WE don't hold the keys? That will not do!
--MAB
Bill is not happy.
However, he has WMV9, DRM and high bandwidth broadband connections to play with. If he launches a solution that will enable you to encode and replay HD content via your PC - with say a movie at 720p in 10-15Gb then he can say to content providers "sell your content with my DRM, in my store, to replay on this system". They will say no, but he doesn't care, he just waits for the hackers to create a system to extract and replay Blu-Ray content via the new system. They can distribute it in the same way they distribute DVDs - at the same time fixing the existing holes that RIAA exploit.
People then have a choice of paying lots for a new system, and new content - or just a HD capable PC and the file sharing that people are already happy with. Cue movie industry meltdown.
This looks to be very much "play nice or I'll get nasty". He can make it so that the easiest HD solution is one based on file sharing. Expect to see secure download to your PC as part of an updated Blu-Ray and HD-DVD spec.
I think MS can just see the real implications of Blu-Ray and they know it's a danger to them (and consumers in general). I don't think MS is being altruistic here, it's just that this time the general good happens to coincide with their goals. I've talked to a few people involved in DRM work at MS. They say that MS is only supporting DRM to appease content providers. From their point of view it limits their capabilities and doesn't really buy them anything. However DRM is the only way to get content providers to play ball.
Now the real danger in the whole Blu-Ray issue is this. The DRM model for Blu-Ray is extremely restrictive and especially wouldn't play nice in a PC type environment. Also, Blu-Ray is a closed spec that must be licensed, so any deviation from this DRM model risks legal action by Sony. The content providers like this because it's a model with legal and/or technical barriers at every link in the chain. However if Blu-Ray really becomes the preferred format for HD media we risk a situation where Sony gets final say in all HD content distribution because they own this heavily restricted standard. So in the end Blu-Ray would become a monopoly coup for Sony and fair use would be seriously crippled in the HD world.
So I'd prefer HD-DVD mostly because it's an open spec that is by nature more consumer friendly. Of course, it also helps that HD-DVD will be significantly less expensive and available for large-scale production in the near term.
It took me a bit of time after reading this article to figure out how to put this, but I think I know now what I'm going to say. I don't buy the idea that DVDs or discs of some sort will be replaced by hard disk space, regardless of what happened to music and iPods.
Back when my ebook was published, there was a lot of talk about how ebooks were going to supplant the print book. It hasn't happened, and there's a few reasons for that. A book that is bound with a spine is called a codex, and there really isn't a way to improve on it as a format. A codex doesn't require electricity, it is portable, and you can do just about anything you want with the book itself. It is completely self contained - the only equipment it is truly linked to in order to function are the eyes of the reader (and something with which to turn pages). An ebook, on the other hand, has copy protection issues to deal with, requires electricity of some sort to use, and if the electronic reader breaks down, the ebook becomes inaccessible, or possibly even lost. Is it any surprise that the numbers that constitute a bestseller for an ebook are a fraction of the what is required for a print book?
Now, take a DVD. So far, I think it's become about as close to what the codex is for books as is possible for movies (although it could be a bit smaller and contain more information). It has no moving parts, it's portable, and while it requires a player to watch the movie, the player breaking down will not damage the movie, or prevent me from taking it to another player.
If it becomes just a download onto a hard drive, a lot of these merits are lost. The movie is attached to the player, if the player goes down the movie can be lost, and there are a bunch of new digital rights issues to deal with (and let's face it, we're not doing that well with figuring out how to deal with digital rights right now). Also, once the movies are being stored on a hard drive, it becomes difficult to deal with them individually - let's say I want to loan one to a friend, or to take one with me when I travel out of town. In order to do that, I'd have to loan or take the entire hard disk.
No, I don't buy the idea of a format like the DVD being supplanted. It has always seemed to me that the most lasting technologies are those that offer the most utility in the simplest way. And, when it comes down to it, DVDs are pretty simple. They can certainly still be improved, but I honestly can't see a portable medium like the DVD being replaced by a medium like the hard disk.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
If the technology is so user-unfriendly, then it'll be defeated by the users, sorry, the customers. The customers already have a technology that works, called DVD. It works good enough for most of them, so you have to give them reasons to upgrade (Bill should know a thing or two about it, from a certain product he has, called Office). If you don't, you won't sell a Blue-Ray player ever.
Well, the studios could refuse to release the films in DVD format, but, you know, that's kind of difficult till you have a big customer base. After all, it's your main revenue source, you don't play with that. And then there is piracy. No amount of protection is going to protect the content, as you will always have at least the analog output to recode, and most likely a tweaked Blue-Ray player to play with.
So I don't particularly care one way or the other. If they protect too much, they'll never win market share, and hard disks are not the only competitor that they will find. Think cheap memory cards, for example. I personally think that these standards are a bit early in the day, driven more by the desire of selling us again the same old films in the shiny new format, than by any customer desire. If they really cared about the customer they would quit displaying stupid screens at the beginning of the DVDs that you cannot skip. I regularly copy my DVDs and you know what, the copies are more used by my family than the originals, because you simply pop the disk and the film starts, no menus, no nothing. So that's a customer desire (my family being fairly typical), and it's not even being considered.
Note to the studios: Do you want to end piracy? Sell DVDs at 3$ from the same day of the first screening, and you are done. You'll even win probably more money than now, as people will buy the cheap DVDs before their friend tell them that the film is no good (what happens with most films nowadays, which was the last film that left you Wow! ? For me it was the Matrix, and that's some years away).
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
VHS macrovision... evil.
DVD region coding... evil.
HD-DVD small capacity... evil.
Blu-Ray Super-DRM... Evil.
Hard Drive distribution failure rates, cost... Evil!
Download network saturation... EVIL!
Streaming-only content lack of persistancy... EEEEVIL!
Wherefore art thou Crystal Storage?
Flash began expensive, and though the cost per byte has fallen, it's still a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than disk drives.
IIRC, that's about always been the price differential.
Another post early on explained it in a great way. Gates may not necessarily care about consumer rights from a humanitarian perspective, but he certainly does from a business perspective.
Basically, he wants Windows to become the complete center of the digital home universe. Everything from TV, music, movies, home automation, personal management, purchases, etc will be done on and controlled by the computer. Problem is, Big Media doesn't want it's content accessible to computers unless they can be guaranteed people won't make copies and/or distribute their copyrighted works. Gates himself has nothing to gain, rather, everything to lose by caving in to high level DRM such as with Blu-Ray. He wants the computer/Windows to be the complete media management solution where people can do essentially anything with media, including stream/copy media to any computer in the house for playback. But again, the media conglomerates see that as an encroachment of their copyright, even if it falls under the category of fair-use.
Anything considered fair-use (in terms of media) is a good thing for Gates, because it means people are free to use his platform to do whatever they want with media they purchase.
"Linux will win because people will crack the technology on a free os?"
I think you're oversimplifying what I wrote.
I don't know if Linux will "win" (whatever that means), but I think it might have an edge over Windows in this case. DRM-enforcing tools for playing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs will appear for Windows, but naturally none will appear for Linux - certainly, no open source tools. Therefore, someone like DVD Jon will hack the DRM and make an open source library that any Linux program can use. At that point, a typical Linux installation will be capable of doing things with Blu-Ray discs that a standard Vista installation can't do.*
We even see this now with copy-protected CDs. The standard protection mechanisms prevent Windows users from ripping their music, but they do nothing to stop Linux and Mac users from ripping.
My suggestion is that Gates wants to avoid that scenario. He'd rather make it easy to get the data onto Windows and thus control what devices are DRM-authorized and which aren't. Make no mistake, Gates is pro-DRM. But he'd like it to reside in a domain he can control.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
I've talked to a few people involved in DRM work at MS. They say that MS is only supporting DRM to appease content providers. From their point of view it limits their capabilities and doesn't really buy them anything.
I would say it is a double edged sword, but it is definately not nothing. On one hand, you have the lock-in to Windows systems protected by hard DRM, on the other side, the infamous Star Wars quote. The last thing Microsoft wants is to create a world where people choose Linux because it is full of DRM workarounds (illegal as they might be), while Windows is stuck with a ton of restrictions. If people understand that "Trusted computing" means "Protected from the user", there will be trouble.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In the history of the world, no medium has been killed because folks couldn't afford to produce for it. Do you know how much it costs to run a symphony orchestra for a year? Yet much new symphonic music is written every year, and performed by the hundreds of symphony orchestras all over the world. This for a medium in which only a tiny fraction of the population is willing to listen at all. Note that ticket prices pay for only a fraction of the cost; the rest is made up in other ways.
If we can keep producing symphonies, I say movies aren't going anywhere, regardless of shifts in their profit model.
"...the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [MPAA] got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs."
Then why are all the major PC manufacturers backing Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD?
Poory billy baby doesnt want to pay SONY royalties so he bad mouths Blu-Ray...
I don't see this as the issue. Here's why: Blu-ray Disc is invented by Sony and Philips. Compact Disc was invented by Sony and Philips. I didn't see Microsoft bad-mouthing CD-ROM.
That's complete nonsense. Yes, Sony and some other companies would have some ownership rights and licensing fees just like regular DVD or MP3 or any lots of other formats. But, "final say in all HD content distribution"? That's completely unfounded.
How did that post get rated a 5, "insightful"?
You have to remember that many people purchase DVDs for extra content as well. In this regard, the extra space will allow for movies to gain back for of the bitrate they sometimes have to sacrifice for the sake of extra features, while at the same time allowing extra features to get more space and quality.
With the advent of HDTV and high definition cameras becoming more prominent, we are not only talking about storing movies in high definition on a disc, but bonus features could be recorded and displayed in the same high definition as well. This would require the extra space, since using the MPEG-2 standard you are going to need more space for the improvement of video from the standard 480 lines to 720 or 1080.
There are several encodings that can be used for video, however, it is often the case in compression that the smaller you make something the more quality-loss you get. The idea is that you have to sample with a certain degree of frequency or your quality will go down. You then need to keep quality up by keeping the bit rates up as well. The idea of a higher bitrate for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is also taking into account the idea of pushing more DTS and Dolby tracks that contain 6.1 or 7.1 audio.
The idea is to plan for the future, and in this case blue laser technology was a logical and rather "simple" step compared to spending time researching and testing new encoding schemes. The idea was actually a simple one, take a laser with a smaller wavelength and we should be able to burn more data into a smaller space. While the design was obviously not THAT simple, it was logically a next step forward from the present technology.
Now on the assumption that the only revolutions in blue laser media storage will be more layers, it would be fairly safe to say that the next step will be improving encodings. Though I do not know the standards of the other approved encodings for Blu-Ray, I do believe they have better storage usage then the standard MPEG-2.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."