Re: DVD
Just a few comments for Bruce and Bill...
MCA might indeed 'jump the gun' and release some films on DVD before the industry as a whole was ready to go forward. More importantly, Time-Warner is set to do the same thing. (Does Sony own them?)
Toshiba (?) just announced that they will be releasing their first players this year. They are the ones claiming to be the furthest along in hardware development and say that they don't want to allow the studios to waste time and squander their lead. Toshiba is supposedly doing this to 'force the hands' of the studios and to jump start the talks.
I'm not sure how the existance of DVD players 'forces' Hollywood to do anything, but perhaps if the Japanese-controlled studios break ranks they can use some sort of divide-and-conquer strategy. Seems far fetched.
Re: Copy protection. I believe that the player-manufacturers and the studios have already come to an agreement about 'preventing' (ha) analog copying from DVD to video-tape. As long as the players don't have digital outs, (they don't) the digital copying issue is mute for the time being.
As I said before, there is no substantial disagreements today between the software and hardware producers...as long as you ignore the computer industry. THAT is where the show-stopping problems are. Obviously, making digital copies of DVD discs is what DVD-ROMs are _for_, and this is giving Hollywood the willies.
Here's the kicker. Hollywood doesn't just want the DVD-ROM decks to be able 'sense' a copywritten movie and refuse to output it digitally, (that's a big problem right there) they want _computers_ (all of them apparently) to be able to sense copywritten material and deal with it appropriately. They want to make that material 'physically impossible' to store, download, upload, anything. Some sort of magical 'C-Chip' in every piece of computer equipment...
Obviously, this is completely, laughably, out of the question in the eyes of the PC industry. Digital data is digital data. Until this gigantic impass is dealt with, the studios say they won't ship a single byte of content. The fact that agreements have been reached regarding non-computer DVD applications is beside the point.
At least, that's how the situation has been explained to me.
Dave Nagy |
