According to a report in Next Generation, Wal-Mart will soon stop selling UMD movies and most of Hollywood is also backing out of Sony’s portable movie format. Why? Sales of UMD movies have died completely. None of the UMD movies are making any money. Chalk this one up as another Sony format failure.
It seems that we are hearing about high definition everything these days. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both launching this year and every major media company is really starting to push the high-def revolution. This year might be the year when enough devices take advantage of HD and enough HDTV’s are within the budget of most consumers. However, is it really all wine and roses for this forthcoming technology advance?
In a word, no. The dirty little secret of this push to high-definition is really a push to DRM and closing the so called “analog hole”. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are going to use a content protection scheme that degrades the quality of the so called “high definition” movies to something much closer to DVD quality if you aren’t using a HDCP enabled connection to your television. Now, if we all owned HDCP enabled HDTV’s this wouldn’t be a problem. However, most of the HDTV’s sold in the last 5 years DON’T have HDCP enabled HDMI(or DVI) connections. What’s worse is that many HDTV’s being bought by consumers today still don’t have HDCP and thus the shiny new Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s they are going to be buying in the next year aren’t going to even show up in high-definition.
So, what is the movie industry going to do about this? Well, they are going to try to not really tell anyone until it’s too late, which I think is a mistake. You don’t hear Sony talking about how Blu-ray isn’t going to be high-definition on most televisions, instead they keep refering to it as “true high-definition”. However, it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger squarely at Sony. Toshiba and others aren’t doing much better to educate consumers about what is really going to be required to experience this high-definition revolution.
Ironically, the only comapnies that seem to realize that most HDTV’s don’t support HDMI/HDCP are the cable/sattelite television companies and Microsoft. Despite the seemingly constant evil of Microsoft, they have actually came out as pro-consumer in the high-def debate. They at least recognized that most HDTV’s use component inputs for their high-definition input when they built the Xbox 360. I for one thought that was a very intelligent decision. My only hope now is that the HD-DVD addon drive for the Xbox 360 somehow bypasses the content protection and allows the watching of HD-DVD in 1080i or 720p. Otherwise, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to end up being one of the biggest wastes of consumer dollars ever and the winner is not going to be either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. The winner is going to be the cable and sattelite comapanies that offer video-on-demand or perhaps a video download service such as iTunes offering movies in HD.
