Tom’s Hardware has a very interesting article up about Microsoft’s recent decision to adopt HD DVD rather than Blu Ray.
I have kind of ignored the whole debate, but recently it has become clear that Blu Ray is truly dedicated to controlling content even more than DVD’s do today and to the complete exclusion of consumers interests. For example, if a Blu Ray key is cracked so that a disc could be copied and played "illegally" (whatever that means in the world of Blu Ray), another disc released at a later date can update the key list to make that (bad) disc no longer play. Yeah, you know what? I don’t care for that. I used to buy all my DVD’s (over 300 to date) and now I use Netflix, but I’m not planning on letting *that* backdoor into my systems, even if I have to do without disc based movies.
There is an implicit contract between consumers of entertainment and the providers of it. While some consumers have run off the rails "stealing" music, the providers are really going too far. The next few years are going to be both fascinating and ugly. The providers will inevitably lose the arms race with the ‘hackers’, but while they are fighting it, we consumers are going to have to deal with all sorts of stupidity and collateral damage.
Who is representing us? Funny, based on the article above, it looks like Microsoft might be, at least a bit…
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