Manufacturer’s Reps Reporting Little Interest in Blu-ray, HD DVD

CD Pro magazine has an article reporting that high-end installers are seeing little interest from their clients in either high definition disc format.

They offer several reasons for this, including lack of content and little really high-end hardware.

Both of those are valid issues, but it does seem that if you have laid out the money for a custom install, that dropping less than a grand on a high definition player, that might or might not be the “winning” format, isn’t that big a risk.

AACS Encryption Key Released

The current buzz is the release of the AACS encryption key from the software DVD player WinDVD.
Knowing the key would allow you to decrypt any High Definition content so you could make a “backup”, transfer the content to another format and/or device, or, obviously, pirate it.

This is just part of the ongoing game of cat and mouse. The key will be revoked, current WinDVD users will need to upgrade and we’ll be right back where we started. Dealing with software players is one thing. The whole thing gets much more interesting if a hardware player’s keys were obtained. Can you imagine if the keys to the PlayStation 3 were released?

Obviously, a majority of the people who are clamoring for DRM-free content want it for non-legitimate purposes, but there needs to be some solution here because right now everyone is losing. Consumers are losing because they are not being offered content they would pay for, and content providers are losing because consumers are rampantly pirating their content since material they would pay for is not legally available.

Clearly something needs to be done about all this. Content providers are not allowing consumers to use the content in reasonable ways and consumers are not respecting the property rights of the content providers. If the content providers would include (for example) a DRM-protected, iPod formatted version of the movie on the DVD, consumers wouldn’t need to rip the disc or download one so they could watch the film on a second device for their legitimate personal use.

HDTV World

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