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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."
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:
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.
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.
Consumers are just that: they consume. They buy. If the first gen DVD doesnt work anymore because HDMI, they'll just buy another one...
In a country where people pay $100 a month for premium cable, and where the main reason people buy HDTVs is Live Sporting Event, I dont think DRM will matter.
As long as Marketing is good - and the Americans are freaking good at Marketing - they'll just pay, thats just the way it works. Good luck changing that.
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.
The ______ Agenda
The main objectives for movie companies with the new digital distribution formats and HDMI are:
1) Get consumers to re-buy their whole movie collection again in a new format
2) Move all or at least the vast majority of their movie sales for home use to a beter protected format so as to defend themselfs from what they currently percieve as their main competition - sharing of movies via the Internet.
3) Monitize or increase their profits in existing markets (for example: video/DVD rentals) and open new markets (internet distribution) while maintaining or extending their ability to control prices.
4) Increase their share of movie publishing.
DRM is the chosen mechanism by which movie publishers aim to remotelly control, enforce and even change (if an internet connection is available) any rules of their choice on the allowed uses of the movies contained on the media that consumers aquire.
Businesses being businesses, they will naturally use those remote control abilities (pun not intended) to maximize their profits - given their behaviour up to now, this will most likelly include maximizing the amount that consumers pay, up to and including pay-per-single-view.
At the same time, the bigguest part of the movie industry (as measured by sales and also, quite likelly, by lobbying power) consists of old-style, long existing, entrenched businesses - they are aiming to remain dominant beyond the next 5 years and certainly have long term strategies in place to ensure that it will be so.
It is clear to all that, before they can achieve their objectives, massive user adoption of DRM supporting hardware is necessary. Assuming that the main players in the movie industry are indeed engaged in a plan which is only expected to give fruit in a medium to long (5+ years) term, it's hardly surprising that they will start by visibly refraining from exercising the remote control that the newest DRM hardware allows them, if they believe that this will accelerate the transition from the current generation of hardware to the new (strong DRM enabled) generation of hardware.
It should also be pretty obvious, that since they haven't actually signed any contract with any consumers by which they [movie publishers] are obliged to not enable their DRM, this announcement of theirs still leaves open to them the possibility to, at any time and with no penalty to them, change their minds if they believe that the market penetration of the newest DRM enable hardware has passed the point beyond which said hardware has become the de facto standard.
In other words, their promises are as worthless as the paper they are written in.
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.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I hope you at least informed her that she can deauthorize all of the computers it was previously set up on. You can then re-authorize the computers she actually wants to use. Details on the 4th bullet down... http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/musicstore/aut horization/
I think you woefully overestimate the intelligence and market sway of the average consumer.
What the whole ICT issue is going to do is create an extra upgrade cycle: everybody will get on the HD bandwagon now, and in a few years they'll roll out HDCP, and in order to watch new content, people will get new televisions.
This works well for the electronics manufacturers, because they get another shot at replacing a good chunk of the public's equipment in a few years, and although it slows the studios getting total content control by a few years, they'll still get what they want in the end.
Particularly because I don't expect the MPAA et al. to be idle in the meantime before the ICT rollout. On the contrary: I suspect they'll be watching the non-HDCP HD rollout very closely, and tallying up ridiculous numbers of dollars lost to "piracy" and "home copying", so that when HDCP comes, it won't just come from the studios, it'll have the full weight of Congress behind it.
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