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Here We Go Again — Video Standards War 2010
Andy Updegrove writes "Think of the words 'standards war,' and if you're of a certain age you're likely to think of the battle between the Betamax and VHS video tape formats. Fast forward, and you'll recall we just finished another video standards war between most of the same companies, this time between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Well, here we go again, except this time its the movie studios that are duking it out, and DRM issues are a big part of it. On the one side are five of the six major studios, dozens of cable, hardware, software, distribution and device vendors, and on the other side there's just Disney — and maybe Apple as well, and that's enough to have the other side worried."
Actually, Disney used a very effective anti-copy technique when they were still using VHS. It would scramble the picture if you tried copying it, it required special equipment and a lot of know how to get around it.
Macrovision? It required special equipment, but that equipment wasn't terribly expensive or difficult to find. The biggest advantage to Disney is that because VHS tapes wear out with repeated viewings and because kids love to watch the same movies over and over again, they had a built-in audience of parents that would need to repurchase the movies at regular intervals. They didn't have to worry about people dubbing the tape and then redubbing it whenever the copy wore out.
It never really slowed down pirates though, just honest people.
I read the internet for the articles.
It is a myth that VHS won over Betamax because of the porn industry. If that were true, then HD-DVD should have beaten Blu-ray. The reason VHS won was 1) less restrictive license, and 2) it could record more an one hour of programming, meaning you could record movies and ball games. The one hour limit was Beta's main downfall.
KeyChest isn't really DRM, it's a central repository for purchase information of DRMed files.
The idea is that companies opt into it, and then every device knows what you own. So when you go download Finding Nemo off iTunes, you can suddenly watch it on your cable box from the cable company, because they are both members of KeyChest and both know that you have a license to that media.
Basically, it solves the "tied to one format" problem. Each file still needs a "real" DRM format, the KeyChest just serves as a central clearing house of what licenses you have.
This would fix one of the MAJOR problems with DRM. It's still DRM, but it would be better than what we have now.
There was a short article on this somewhere (Gizmodo, Engadget, Ars Technica, somewhere) last week. I can't find it right now.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Or just an old enough video recorder.
I had an old recorder and copied Disney Movies without a problem. The problem arouse when we tried to copy my copy on another set of vcrs. The copy protection was still there on the copy.
The vcr copy protection required the target vcr to support copy protection.
The TFA talks about the war between Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) from 6 of the big movie studios versus Keychest from Disney. But the important this is that Keychest is not DRM . As the name implies its a Key management service, proposed by Disney. It needs DRM such as DECE or Apple's Protected AAC stuff to work. The TFA's author doesnt seem to grasp the basic difference.
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Technically, Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder of Disney. His shares come to about 7% of Disney. He is also a shareholder in Apple but I'm not sure what about how many shares he has.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The internet streaming side without DRM, I would imagine. They make their money from repeat customers and, unlike hollywood, seems to have worked out that the value that they provide is creating new content.
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I really don't mind paying for my movies, tv shows and music. I do regret that such a big part goes to the studio vs musicians but that's the way it is in every industry.
What I do mind is not being able to use what I have as I should.
I want to be able to move recorded shows from my PVR to my laptop/ipod/psp/whatever
I want to par a reasonable price for rent vs buy and cheaper for the electronic compressed version. Why would I pay 20$ for a compressed movie when I can get a DVD for often half that price and the DVD will be easy to rip to PSP so my kid can watch it in the car?
You can play single player Steam games offline so long as you run Steam in offline mode.
Not completely true, it depends on the game.
L4D2 will not run offline PERIOD. You get ~5 minutes of game play before the game kicks you out because it can't connect to Steam. This will happen even in offline mode...
JPEG was explicitly designed not to be patent encumbered. Sure, a couple of trolls not involved in the JPEG standard process claim to have patents. But that can happen to any format. They are not in the same category as the various MPEG standards.