Pact Not to Use Image Constraint Token Until 2010?

Devlin C. writes "Ars Technica reports that many major movie studios and several consumer electronics companies have an unofficial pact not to use the controversial Image Constraint Token in movies until at least 2010, presumably in an effort to spur early adoption. As the article at Ars notes, this would explain why both the low-end PS3 and the Xbox360 lack HDMI. The companies think it's not necessary to have right now, and they would rather shave costs than sell future-proof hardware."

Comments

great? except it's one more thing to explain

[yagu]

At first blush this may seem a happy development, and it will have been if it contributes to the ulimate demise of any future Image Constraint Token or consideration thereof in the future.

I predict one of two things:

• the entertainment, as hinted in the article, will get cold feet an renege on what turns out to be a gentleman's agreement only, and goes ahead with the ICT anyway.
• ICT isn't introduced, and some percentage of the shipped players and/or TV's will have something forked up because the manufacturers had incomplete information, and ICT hampers some percentage of what will be very irritated consumers.

Of course, we'll all be on point and have been handed yet one more piece of a puzzle to understand (I read the article, I'm not totally sure it makes sense to me) and be able to guide friends and family to informed decisions about what equipment to buy and how to make it work. (To friends and family: "You'll have to make sure the TV and player you buy has HDMI so you'll get to see the pretty pictures. No, wait!, You might not need HDMI afterall. Of course, you'll have to have it by the year 2010.") I'm pretty close to recommending people who have working equipment to stay with what they have. (Of course, that recommendation has the pitfall of putting them in harm's way when suddenly new transmissions and DVDs they've been persuaded to buy don't work with what they have.)

The entertainment industry has successfully lobbied to enact laws to satisfy their need to control this technology, and now they're showing they can't even manage that!

Seems like I'm ending most of my posts the same way these recent days...:

Sigh.

Re:Console wars are silly

[cgenman]

480p is safe to assume for the Wii. NoJ has said they won't be getting into the HD wars, and it would be catastrophic for their system to try to push 720p volumes of pixels at it's power level. Better to compete while rendering fewer dots per pass.

1080p is the highest the PS3 will support. But from what I've heard high-def support isn't required for PS3 developers as it is for X360 developers. Expect to see a lot of PS3 games shipping with 720p as their max resolution (and rightfully so, it's a pretty good balance between resolution and effects-per-pixel).

The X360 is 1080i max.

To answer the grandparent poster, the PS3 was sold as the next movie platform for high-def televisions. Now it is getting slammed because the low-end won't support the image encryption standard Sony (and others) have forced onto us, making it potentially not a movie platform at all.

The Wii makes no pretention to High-def gaming, while the X360 is flagrantly about it while avoiding the movie debate. The PS3 on the other hand is the full deal, hundreds more than the competition, yet the part that may set it apart from the crowd is the part that simply may cease to work on a Hollywood whim.

It's not a question of whether HDMI is important or isn't. It's a question of achieving the standards set forth in your propoganda. Nintendo never said it had the most powerful console out there, it said it had a "powerful enough" gaming system with a nifty controller and a library of backcatalog games. Microsoft never said the 360 was a movie player, but rather an amazing Xbox Live delivery vehicle that had some solid gameplaying power and high-def graphics. Sony, however, always said the PS3 was going to be a movie box. But without HDMI (or HDMI upgradability), that could end at any moment. It's not important to Nintendo because they aren't selling based upon that. Sony is.

Re:There's a point to be made

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Please go educate the masses of "average consumer".

I'll bet 90% of people of buy DVDs dont know what DRM is or what it does to them.

In general I think you're probably right, but I did have a surprising conversation last week with someone who definitely wasn't a computer nerd. She had basically been screwed over by iTunes and the 3 computer limit that this software imposes. (Excuse me if I don't get the exact details right -- I'm not interested in buying music in crippled formats for myself). She had activated her laptop and a couple of her work machines, but had then changed jobs and had her laptop stolen. The result was that although she still had the music, she was unable to play it at all, and I can tell you she understood exactly what was going on and she was not happy at all about it.

So it seems to me that as more people get screwed over by the music distributors, the message will eventually get out, even if only in a simple form -- "my ripped MP3s work, but my paid downloads don't".

Rich.