Fuck Blu-Ray™ & HD-DVD™

Well, perhaps such invectives are a little out of line in light the fact that no one I know has EVER SEEN EITHER OF THEM (that might change soon). That said, between all the bending over backwards for the Television and Film industries, (learn you about "Blu-Ray Security", hint, it's not your security they're worried about) I am not really looking forward to these devices despite promises of enough space to actually back up our 200+GB HD's.

For those who are new to the HD-DVD & Blu-Ray formats, they are designed to replace the current optical media (CD's & DVD's) for some stated reasons:
30-50GB's per disk, HD video content, media transferrability (e.g. "Mandatory Managed Copy")

as well as some actual reasons:
reselling video content again (VHS->DVD->HD-DVD), phone-home security (player calls in for latest hacks and patches self against exploition), and forcing certain media formats on consumers


The gist of this whole thing is that the big movie companies have made a lot of money in the last decade driven in a large part by the sales of DVD's for both new movies as well as replacements for degrading VHS copies and people who want better video quality and audio options. Now that most of the people who were going to replace their cassette libraries have done that, and with nothing to blame stagnant revenues except piracy (be a good citizen), a new format that everyone has to buy would be great. If it happens to be the case that it fixes the mess that was CSS (DVD's *poor* encryption scheme) and also encourage Microsoft's video formats by making it so that the "transferrability" part of the disks is only in encrypted WMP derived formats, that's purely accidental.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Hollywood gets it infinitely more than the Music Industry, which is to say not at all. Sean believes that the amount of money that there is to be made by licensing non-encrypted media on a GIGANTIC level will somehow open their eyes, but I just don't agree based on all of the behavior I've seen. The one message I keep getting from our IP banks (the **AA's) is that it's not about money, it's about power, it's about momentum, and it's about maintaining the bureaucracy. Mr. Collins' example was perfect. If it were about the money, Napster would have been bought outright, made available every song in the collective RIAA library unencrypted for $.25 apiece, and they would have made infinity hojillion dollars.

Via my head.

Raul