Devoted to show business and the entertainment industry

Right Nation reported on an open scathing rebuke to the electronic entertainment industry. Gerry Block of gear.ign.com revealed some unbelievable burdens that the industry will be placing on existing customers. Here are some of his comments:

”In perhaps the greatest disservice to the general consumer market yet perpetrated by players in the electronic entertainment industry, it has been revealed that next-generation DVD technologies (HD-DVD and Blu-ray) will only function with monitors and HDTVs with HDMI or DVI connections.”

"She may be attractive, but she's 

still a next-gen-dvd succubus"

”What does that mean to you? If you purchased an HDTV more than a couple of years ago, chances are you are using Component Video (the red, green, and blue plugs) to connect HD sources to your TV. Component Video is an analog transmission, which means that it can't work with the absurdly stringent AACS copy-protection Hollywood has insisted be integrated into the new formats. Thus, no HDMI input on your TV, no hi-def DVD for you. If you don't have a compatible TV, you'll either receive a massively downgraded sub-720p resolution version of the content, or what the studios are suggesting, a warning screen followed by nothing.”

Who’s behind this push to slam the over 3,000,000 HDTV owners in ? The large movie studios put together a group of people called Advanced Access Content System (AACS). That was where the report by Reuters came from last week that conjectured Sony would probably miss their spring launch of the PS3, because the AACS had not made the final decision concerning the technical side of the protocol.

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Right Nation said this: 

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“After a good six months of deliberation since version AACS v.0.9 was put into testing, and only 2 or 3 months away from the supposed release of the first HD-DVD and Blu-ray players, AACS has finally made the baby step of offering provisional licensing to the likes of Sony, Toshiba, and the other early manufactures of hi-def DVD solutions.” 

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Gerry Block concluded that “This is a dark day for the entire consumer electronics industry. Huge manufacturers like Sony and Toshiba have allowed Hollywood executives to punish consumers for the studios' inability to protect their own content in the wild. Despite the fact that the relationship between movie piracy and the floundering movie theater receipts of recent years has not been proven to be direct, Hollywood is applying an iron fist in their aim to control the next generation of the home-theater experience. You know those previews on DVDs that you can't skip through? That's only the beginning of the ways Hollywood wants to control your entertainment experience.” 

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This is one of those cases where I don’t think the motion picture industry can win no matter what happens here. The unforgivable sin of making your customer experience frustrating, more difficult and running over them can’t be good for their business. It will be interesting to see what happens when the overall public learns what is really about to happen.