HD-DVD Post-Mortem

Andy Marken has google-doc'ed his latest "Content Insider", this one on the death of HD-DVD.

It's not really a glowing endorsement of Blu-Ray (nor should it be) nor is it a rose-colored prediction for the download market (nor should it be).

Andy hits the nail on the head when he says:

The stability of a single format may help push sales up but consumers as economists delicately say are still …price conscious.

Convince me that I should pay $29 for a high-def version of I Know Who Killed Me instead of the $6 version that's in the bin at Wal-Mart. Anyone?

He uses Raiders of the Lost Ark for his central movie reference, but to me the a propos line comes from Men In Black, when Tommy Lee Jones looks at this new storage format and sighs:

This is gonna replace CD's soon; guess I'll have to buy the White Album again...

Unfortunately, the big guys have made a business model out of selling us the same stuff over and over again. But critical to being able to do this is:

1. Buy Congress to keep extending copyright
2. Never actually sell anything to anyone

Old Walt Disney's 40 years dead, but his corporation controls Mickey Mouse to this day. (Keep in mind that copyright has, as its sole purpose, the fostering of creative works. It's been well perverted to prevent that.)

#2 is one near and dear to my heart. I pay huge sums of money to get a cable signal into my house. I'm forced to pay to get what I want, because I can't get just what I want, I have to get everything that my cable company needs to satisfy their business model. Meaning I pay for hundreds of channels I never use.

But despite paying for that signal, the cable companies go through considerable effort to make it so that you can't do with that signal what you will. The signal coming through the cable is encrypted, sometimes in defiance of law. Even if you have a cable box and run things through that, they'll encrypt the signal coming out of the Federally-required-but-often-not-activated firewire port.

In short, you can plug that cable into your TV or into an "approved" recorder, most likely one that they lease you. Don't like it? Tough luck. You get what you're given. Don't like it? Bitch to the FCC. (They might respond.They might not.) Just because you pay for it--and handsomely--doesn't mean you actually own anything. Not even the right to view things when you please, like you used to with VCRs.

Though, if you're lucky, you can get a reduced quality version of your cable box's output.

How's that for a mixed message? We want you to demand high-definition stuff! But, uh, we don't really have the capacity (or the drive, it seems) to give it to you the way you want it. So, here, have crap.

If history holds true, technology will break their backs, and they'll get rich as a result. And then, when the next big tech thing comes along, they'll fight that to the death, as well.

(Click on the HTPC links to see my efforts to build a fully-functioning hi-def Home Theater PC.)