I doubt there have been millions of HD sets sold in the U.S. so far. I'd be amazed if there were even a million sold. Still, it would suck if none of them worked with HD discs.

PS: I'm 1/7th of the way toward breaking even on my film. Am I being greedy in wanting the best in copy protection? Am I wrong for wanting Sony (who's distibuting it) to do the best they can to prevent piracy?

PS: I'm 1/7th of the way toward breaking even on my film. Am I being greedy in wanting the best in copy protection? Am I wrong for wanting Sony (who's distributing it) to do the best they can to prevent piracy?

You should always want to get the most money for what you do. The real question you need to ask -- as does everyone else involved -- is whether copy protection is going to meet that goal, and whether it will get you even one more dollar.

In the software business back in the 1980's LOTS of firms copy protected their software including lots of big names at the time, like Ashton-Tate.

However, the firms that were eventually the winners (like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Corel, WordPerfect) did not. The reasons were that copy protection was horrendously onerous for the really big corporate customers to administer, and the really big money came from them. In addition, the smaller customers who stole the easier to copy, non-protected software actually provided very valuable "viral" marketing, although few companies were willing to admit to this publicly. Also, at that time (late 1980's), many companies realized that there was money to be made by providing better customer support and service. Those days, of course, are long over. Very few computer hardware or software companies provide much support and service any more.

For video, copy protection is never going to provide much real protection. Any scheme can and will be broken. DeCSS didn't take long. Even the wireless encryption (WEP) was broken fairly easily. Your stuff will be stolen, no matter what.

The point I am trying to make is that the way to maximize profit is not by minimizing piracy, but by maximizing sales. It's like trying to solve the world's energy problems by conserving: What can you save? 10%, 20%? By contrast, if you can develop new energy, you've got infinite possibilities.

Big money usually comes from quantity sales. I don't know the content of your video, but I'd be looking for groups, distributors, dealers, countries, agencies, etc. that potentially would buy fifty at a time.

More than you wanted to hear at this point, I'm sure.

I must admit I agree with possabilityX. I am waiting and own no HD equipment [ except Vegas 6 if that counts ] I think High definition is great but these content providers gotta get their crap together. They will have to narrow the formats down or sell DVD players & tv's that decode all of the formats / coding used. Until then I am not a buyer. Like others, my wallet would not be very pleased about a 1500.00 mistake let alone a 3500.00 one.

johnmeyer,
Your ideas are fairly sound if, and only if, you're talking about mass-market stuff. Sure, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. didn't copy protect, but their products aren't niche market things. How many copies of high-end film compositing software do you think get sold compared to word processing software? Likewise with films, a big film like "War Of The Worlds" will get enough viewers even if it's already available online; or people will buy a legitimate copy when it hits DVD. But with smaller films, like mine, they're never going to sell millions of copies, so any missed sale has an impact.

If you allow theft but count on making up for it in volume you'll soon be out of business. And the only films that will still get made are the big stupid blockbuster wannabes that everyone complains about (but that enough people go to see).

You're actually missing a vital point, copy protection only serves to make piracy profitable. Did prohibition stop the supply of alcohol, no way, just forced the price up and therefore made bootleging profitable. Who stands to loose the most from the removal of copy protection, the pirates. Make it so Joe Average can't break it without a $1M worth of gear and bet your bottom dollars someone will invest the $1M to do it and charge more for the pirated copies.

You doubt there's 1 million HDTVs in the USA, you jest, you're probably reading this on a device capable of displaying HD video, how many LCDs and CRTs are there capable of more than 640x480?

Bob.

farss,
Giving up on copy protection is not the answer. At least it works to a certain degree. Having zero copy protection means making zero money. Prohibition didn't stop all alcahol from being sold, but it sure put a major dent in sales. I'm aware that there are always ways around security systems, but that doesn't mean you keep the bank and its vault unlocked just because the bank down the street got robbed despite its security systems.

As for my comment about there being less than a million HD television sets, sure, many computer screens are capable of that resolution, but I have been specifically talking about television sets, not computer monitors. After all, I'm pretty sure that computer HD disk drives will play on current monitors because they'll be hooked up via the graphics card's output rather than connecting the drive itself to the monitor.

Firstly,
no HD disks will NOT play on current computers. The local PC mag, APC was flooded with letters bitching about this and half of them were blaming this on uSoft, that's how uninformed even computer users are. You'll need uSofts next OS, new graphics cards and display devices. Without that it'd be a piece of cake to record unencrypted HiDef content straight from the video cards output, Sony and others make the gear to do this.

I've yet to see anything to support your statement that no copy protection = no sales, in fact if it was 100% effective I'd go so far as to say it hinders sales.

1) I have one client I edit and author for, manages to sell about 5,000 DVDs per year, zero copy protection, we know we used to loose maybe 5-10% of sales to piracy, changed our marketing stratergy and problem solved. If we could add copy protection that's $5K / annum in licencing that still would not stop any kid from copying the DVDs anyway, we'd rather have the $5K.

2) We have the odd pirated DivX CD, young adults in the house it's par for the course. Guess what, I've bought quite a few of those movies as legit copies, if I hadn't seen the pirated copies I would never have bought them.

3) Around Xmas some guy in the USA puts on a fancy lightshow to a tune by Trans Siberian Orchestra, all in breach of copyright as was the video, after some difficulty (none of their material available down here) I've now got a couple of their CDs, they can thank a 'pirate' for those sales.

The biggest problem I see in this debate is one of semantics. Lets be specific, there's file sharing and there's out and out piracy. The former no one makes any money out of, if one excludes ISPs, the latter is run by highly organised government 'sanctioned' organised crime and it's very much for profit. You need to be an expert to tell their product from the real deal, yes their copies are even copy protected.
No one says much about the real pirates because they're a very hard target to get to, the governments involved make the odd token raid, the day after all the valuable gear has been moved elsewhere and that's it. The fact is they cannot afford to stop it, way too many people depend on it for their living. Trust me, I'd be surprised if there isn't copies of your movie for sale in the streets of Asia already, probably before it was for legit sale. You'd be amazed what they'll pirate, even 'religious' movies, I know, one of my clients regularly has their stuff pirated in HK.

Now file sharing is a very different beast, I'm not saying it's not having an impact but I suspect for some types of movies the impact on sales may even be positive, probably for the Hollywood mainstream movies the impact is negative but they can probably tolerate 10% loss. But for the boutique content I suspect the viral marketing effect is overall positive for sales. I'm not really making a call one way or the other here, it's still wrong but it bugs me that it gets so much press when there's way, way bigger out and out theft going is going on and very little noise is made about it.

The piracy business is huge, I mean do you have any idea what it costs to set up a DVD replication facility, hardly the thing you can hide in a basement and yet they're there, making legit looking copies at the rate of several every second 24/7.

Bob.

Course, my TV's HDMI specifications say it supports HDCP also. Time will tell.

Insofar as copy protection is concerned, what about the novel idea of pricing a product so inexpensively that ANYONE can afford it and there would be very little reason (if ever there is) to make unauthorized copies? (That's why I charge $4.95 postpaid for my DVD. A fast dime is better than a slow quarter, plus why not make it affordable?)

Brooks Jensen, photographer and editor of LensWork magazine, has this to say about pricing (from his website, www.brooksjensenarts.com):

About Commerce

I have been, for a long time now, an advocate of the philosophy we use in the LensWork Special Editions, that is to say Fine Art Photography at Real People Prices™. I believe this even more strongly in my personal work. It is a simple and fundamental idea that photography is the most democratic art and should be – deserves to be – affordable enough that everyone can own images and treasure them as a part of their everyday life and experience. I applaud the expensive and collectible artwork found in typical art galleries and in no way exclude photography from this category. I do, however, still believe there is a place for affordable images in the everyday lives of all of us who love images. Because of my experience as the publisher of the LensWork Special Editions, I am even more dedicated to "real people prices" than ever before. Since 1998, LensWork has sold over 20,000 gelatin silver prints about half of which were less than $50. My philosophy about bringing photography to a new level of affordability is not a theory; LensWork has defined a new marketing paradigm which we are pleased that others have chosen to follow. I carry this philosophy even farther with my personal work. I create artwork because I love to. I sell artwork so I can make room for more I am now creating. I am discouraged at the thought that some people would love a work of art – particularly an easily reproduced piece like photography – but would be separated from it because of a barrier of price. I price my work so everyone can buy as much as they are motivated to enjoy.

Alcohol prohibition and copy prevention are two examples where restrictions might serve to reduce availability, but not by much.

A little off-topic, but in my surfing this morning I came across this site. You know how the recent news laments that the Chinese government is really trying to crack down on unrestricted Internet access, and how Google has capitulated to their demands? Turns out that there are multiple ways that an Internet-savvy surfer (let's say, oh, about 98% of anyone under 21 in China) can bypass those restrictions, including one method that relies on a free translation service provided by-- TaDaa!-- Google itself!

I have little doubt that the copy restrictions imposed on HD-DVD and BluRay can and will be cracked unless they get REALLY extreme, but my point is that the main argument for going to those formats (increased storage space)* is a red herring--you don't need the increased storage space for HD if you use a more-modern codec. No one seems to be addressing that fact. I want to be able to show my HDV masterpieces to people, and right now there's no universal way to do that.



* "Increased storage space" is the reason we users would want these new formats. Manufacturers want to sell new hardware. Content providers want to cut off the flood of copying.

John,

You said it beautifully about copy protection. It is not helpful for mass market consumer products, because the pirates are not impeded, and the consumers are stuck with a higher price to pay for the manufacturer's licenses for various CP schemes.

And I knew both Ashton and Tate (inside joke). The company didn't survive, but some of their code STILL lives. Yes, dBase is still used in some current products in 2006.

I have a problem with pirate copying too, and it was quite widespread. My response was to find ways to get my customers (mostly institutions) to be able to buy from me in bulk legally at prices that are possible for them to get into their budgets. In some cases that meant "cheapening" the product a little bit, but it was all OK to the customers.

It's always OK (in the customer's eye) to raise or to lower your price, as long as you justify it with good reasons. This is a whole science though.

It's like trying to solve the world's energy problems by conserving: What can you save? 10%, 20%? By contrast, if you can develop new energy, you've got infinite possibilities.

Here's the only part where I beg to differ. Developing new energy sources has turned out to be incredibly difficult, so conservation has gone a long way to reduce the energy import extortion risks in those countries where they have actually bothered to do some conservation.

The current "hydrogen economy" bullsh*t has been used only as an excuse to not do anything about the current problems, because "an infinite supply that will solve alll problems is so close at hand."

Somebody pointed out that GM's latest hydrogen fuel cell $1M concept car needed 8 times as much electricity to produce the hydrogen to drive one mile as their old EV-1 electric car needed to charge its battery to go the same distance.

(And the majority of our electricity in the U.S. comes from the coal-fired power plants that are turning the Grand Canyon and other national parks into the next historical subject for Ken Burns, "this is what it used to look like..." with faded film footage and reverential glides over clear still photos.)

Yes, additional energy sources are worth a lot of research funding. This should include a trip to other countries where they have many decades of successful, commercially viable experience with this already.

Coursedesign:
I might add that the Alberta Canada tar sands (untold trillions of barrels of oil reserves which drawf the Middle east) is now pumping out a million barrels a day oil which is much cleaner than any other location. It is more expensive. China and India are involved and "T" Bone Pickens new company. He says you will never see $1.50 gasoline again ever. They need 150,000 new people there right now and the average wage is !20K per year. The reserves are so huge that they cannot even begin to estimate how many trillions of barrels are there. Best keep in mind not to piss off a Canadian.

JJK

Yes, this could definitely give Canada more respect in the U.S.

You'll be treated like Arab oil sheiks here in the 1970s:

"Yessir, whatever you say sir, we'll take care of it sir, thank you sir."

:O)

Just be humble enough to realize that you don't know yet how much of the tar sand oil "that dwarfs the Middle East" is extractable at a reasonable cost.

I doubt there have been millions of HD sets sold in the U.S. so far. I'd be amazed if there were even a million sold. Still, it would suck if none of them worked with HD discs.

From my post two weeks ago: As of Jan. 1, 2006, 16 million U.S. households now have at least one HDTV set, per a Scientific Atlanta survey quoted in Broadcast Engineering magazine.

That could be a very big ouch for content distribution using the new high definition disk formats, which risk going the way of the commercial Divx (not related to the codec) DVD format of the late 1990s.

It was very inconvenient for the customer, and nobody liked it. Circuit City was the creator of this scheme, at least they got a $114M write-off from it (which came out of our tax payer pockets of course :O).

So how was this total market failure presented?

"[Though] sales at participating Divx retailers reflect strong consumer interest in the Divx feature...unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain adequate support from studios

Wonder if he went into politics after that?

Ho-ho-ho.

Whatever happened to...?

"Give the people what they want, and they will give you what you want." --William Ballester

I dredged up this old thread from February because I just came across thisinteresting website that discusses the various HD disk formats. One of them, in particular, sounds like exactly what I was hoping for at the beginning of this thread. It's called "EVD" and is backed by a Chinese consortium. That's probably a good thing, because (a) most of our DVD players come from Chinese factories these days anyway, and (2) there is an enormous customer base in that single country.

I've never heard of EVD before, but if I can soon find a cheap Apex player at Walmart for $100 that has EVD capability, I'm buying them for myself and members of my extended family!

Jeez, EVD, FVD, what next?

JJK

I didn't read the whole thing... nowhere close, but one thing that caught my eye was the following:

Why should I want high definition DVD?

In my opinion, and my experience, it's not the same thing--not a fair comparison. There was a vast difference between VHS and DVD. Such is not the case with DVD and HDV.

The extra features on most DVDs is a waste anyway. Why should this make the content any better? It wouldn't.

Fitting an entire season of any television show onto one disc has no appeal to me, since I do not watch network television anyway. Frankly, I like having one disc per movie, it's like having one book per novel.

Too, all this hype about HD is nothing more than the purveyors of the technology trying to create a market for their porduct because SD has, for the most part, reached the saturation point. That's my opinion. I for one refuse to be sucked into it.

No one, as of today's date, has given me any real compelling reason to spend all the money required to switch to HD anything. What I've seen simply does not justify the expense. Not yet.

Want a 'higher' definition experience without spending a fortune?
Switch to PAL, I think you'll notice a worthwhile improvement going from 4:3 SD NTSC to 16:9 SD PAL, need to feed the TV via component from the DVD player.


I suspect quite a bit of the improvement in image quality that HD does provide could also be achieved by improved connection to the TV and by switching to native 16:9 TVs. Also I was kind of amazed to discover that there's almost no 16:9 SD in the USA.

Bob.

"Too, all this hype about HD is nothing more than the purveyors of the technology trying to create a market for their porduct because SD has, for the most part, reached the saturation point."

In other words, it's a solution in search for a problem.

"For video, copy protection is never going to provide much real protection. Any scheme can and will be broken. DeCSS didn't take long. Even the wireless encryption (WEP) was broken fairly easily. Your stuff will be stolen, no matter what."

From what I read, Blu-Ray DVD players will incorporate a dynamic security process, so that the copy prevention ("copy protection" - LOL) can be dynamically rewritten whenever the hackers beat the current system. You pop a new bDVD into your player, and it updates your player firmware.

So, can you imagine the consumer backlash if Hollywood's new firmware makes your older bDVD's unplayable? And you thought the Sony CD Rootkit problem was big news.......

Steve Mann