THE FRONT LINE: FEBRUARY 2, 2006
Are We All Bozos On The HDTV Disc Bus?
Some readers may be old enough to remember the Firesign Theater and their unique combination of satire, absurdism, and political humor that spanned several albums in the late 60s and early 70s.
I’ve paraphrased the title of this commentary from one of those albums. Although the Theater’s heyday was too long ago to include any references to HDTV and the growing political and legal debates over digital rights management, they would have had a field day with some of the current proposals to protect (perhaps in vain) Hollywood’s digital content.
This column was prompted by a story that ran on January 23 on the DVDexclusive.com Web site that detailed the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) being proposed for the new HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc formats.
Ostensibly, the intent of AACS adopters is to ensure digital movies and TV shows can’t be copied by (1) restricting their full HD resolution to digital display interfaces and (2) forcing downconversion to lower resolution images when connected to analog component video inputs on an older HDTV set.
According to the article, those of us early adopters with HDTVs that don’t have DVI or HDMI inputs would only see HDTV programs delivered at 960x540 resolution. That’s a little better than standard-definition DVDs (720x480), but not quite 1280x720.
In fact, the difference between this 540p format and 480p from DVDs is, according to supporters to analog downconversion, not one that most viewers would ever notice. (Careful — that kind of thinking could come back to haunt you…)
Putting aside the argument that the average consumer doesn’t have any pressing need for an HD disc format right now, how dumb is this proposal? One of the classic lessons of marketing is to make your product as inexpensive, attractive, and convenient to use as possible, in order to ensure its ultimate success in the marketplace.
Encumbering an expensive Blu-ray or HD DVD player with this analog format downconversion system will only make adoption of these new disc formats more difficult, and could likely turn into a public relations nightmare for all of the HD DVD and Blu-ray software and hardware partners, positioning them as Orwellian “bad guys” by the mainstream consumer media outlets.
In fact, that is already happening. The High-Definition Disc Consumer Advocacy Alliance, a group of magazines and Web sites that cover the consumer electronics industry, was formed in November of 2005 to (in their own words) “…spearhead an effort to bring an awareness of the substantial risks of destructive policies and proposed measures to the motion picture and consumer electronic industries…”, particularly with respect to HD DVD and Blu-ray. These aren’t media outlets favored by early adopters and opinion shapers that Hollywood wants to tick off.
Add in the budding format war between the two DVD camps, the huge installed base of DVD players with progressive scan output (and some with format upconversion to 720p and 1080i), and the inability of many viewers to see the difference between 480p and 720p, 768p, and 1080i, and you can see plenty of reasons not to bet on the success of either HD disc format.
HD DVD and Blu-ray partners also face the growing popularity of cable and satellite set-top boxes with built-in hard disc recorders and time-shifting capabilities, inexpensive video-on-demand services, and the slowly-growing alternative media marketplace that is figuring out ways to distribute original SD and HD video content with little or no restrictions through high-speed Internet connections, on portable flash drives, and on high density red-laser DVDs.
If you can access an HD movie or TV shows any time you want through your cable or satellite box for a nominal sum, why would you want to invest in a large library of high-definition DVDs? If you already have a quality DVD player with progressive output and perhaps even format conversion, why should you buy a whole new DVD player, particularly if your HDTV screen is smaller than 50 inches?
These are far more important questions for the HD DVD and Blu-ray advocates to be addressing, not spending their time on introducing a new disc format while simultaneously putting so many restrictions on its use as to effectively render the winning disc format — whichever it turns out to be — stillborn. And that’s if the marketplace hasn’t already figured out a better way to access HD content, using non-proprietary platforms.
What do they think we are — a bunch of bozos?
