I haven’t been paying very close attention to the “format wars” between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, the two formats vying to replace DVDs, but one sentence in this Reuters story jumped out at me:
[The DVD format] has been the most-quickly adopted technology in consumer electronics history and has generated billions of euros in royalties for the inventors, a broad base of consumer electronics companies including firms now divided over the format of its successor.
The fight for license income may yet hurt the interests of consumers, who would face two disk formats that do not play back on all devices. The conflict evokes memories of the VHS-Betamax war for the VHS standard, or more recently the rewritable DVD standard.
On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players by, in some instances, removing regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any “hack” and the device can be disabled remotely.
“A hacked player is any player that is doing something it’s not supposed to do,” Setos said, adding the jury was still out on whether regional coding would be maintained or scrapped.
Will Big Brother be watching? Why had I not heard about this before? Didn’t DiVX try something like this once?
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