Paramount's decision to back Blu-ray and HD DVD may avert format war
Hollywood (CA) - The first major break in averting a high-definition disc format war - at least among the studios that support them - may have come late Sunday, when Paramount announced it would release its titles on Sony's Blu-ray format, in addition to the HD DVD format to which it was already committed.
In a statement that can indeed be interpreted as support for Blu-ray, not just acquiescence, Reuters quotes Thomas Lesinski, Paramount Pictures' president, as saying last night, "After more detailed assessment and new data on cost, manufacturability and copy protection solutions, we have now made the decision to move ahead with the Blu-ray format." According to reports, Lesinski said that Sony's decision to include Blu-ray players in its next-generation PlayStation 3 was critical in swaying Paramount's support, thus making the likely leading game platform of 2006 into a Blu-ray movie player as well. Microsoft - which, along with Intel, announced their membership in the HD DVD Promotions Group at this time last week - has made no similar announcement with regard to possible HD DVD inclusion in a future Xbox 360 console.
In an interview with TG Daily, part 1 of which was published on Friday, Josh Peterson, the director of strategic alliances for the Optical Storage Solutions group of HP - which supports Blu-ray - told us that the Blu-ray Disc Association was making inroads with the one-half of Hollywood studios and content providers that had expressed support for HD DVD. Despite Intel's and Microsoft's joint announcement last week, Peterson said, it will be the major studios whose decisions over the coming weeks may lead to the kinds of compromises that can avert a repeat of the VHS/Betamax format war.
"At this point, we'd all love to see just one single format come to market," said Peterson. "In fact, we still have hope of that. We've been working real hard with the other half of the Hollywood studios to gain support for Blu-ray Disc, and we're happy with the progress that we've made there. But at the same time, we feel that there's a huge imbalance in hardware support, and that's why we're having such good progress with the other half of the studios." Peterson's remarks came in advance of Paramount's announcement Sunday night.
Critical to swaying the studios' support, said Peterson, will be Blu-ray's inclusion of extensive and controversial content and digital rights management features, designed to give studios a pro-active technological channel to pursue content pirates and mitigate damages from distribution of unlicensed content. In their joint statement, Microsoft and Intel claimed Blu-ray had no policy with regard to managed copy - the capability for users to make legal backup copies of licensed content to recordable discs or hard drives, for streaming elsewhere in their networked households. Disputing their claim, Peterson said the companies were taking advantage of a technicality. No, managed copy isn't part of the Blu-ray format. It's a part of the DRM system they chose to adopt, called Advanced Access Content System (AACS), which is also used in HD DVD, but which in Blu-ray is complemented by two other technologies, both of which are also independent of Blu-ray's format specifications.
As we've reported here, AACS will require the high-def player to be continually connected to the Internet. When code from a newly inserted disc fails a test performed by the content management site (which may be run by the studios themselves), a code can be sent by the site to the player, flashing its ROMs and, in effect, telling it to "self-destruct." To this destructive sequence, Blu-ray adds a feature called BD+ that can potentially be used as a repair sequence. HP's Peterson describes BD+ as "a renewability feature that allows the movie studios to actually go in and patch the content protection code, if it's been hacked. They can't go in and fix something that's already been hacked. But they can fix the protection so that it can't be hacked again in the same way on the next disc."
