Good news from Sony about Blu-ray and copy protection
Friday, March 10th, 2006Sony had news a few days ago about their upcoming Blu-ray plans. One important tidbit is about copy protection.
Sound And Vision Magazine: Blu-ray to Debut May 23:
In an important aside, Don Eklund, SPHE’s senior vice president for advanced technologies, said that Sony’s initial Blu-ray discs — and all of its Blu-ray titles for the forseeable future — will be free of the “Image Constraint Token” that’s built into the Blu-ray and HD DVD standards. This controversial digital flag instructs the player to down-res the video signal from its analog component-video outputs to a standard-definition image to prevent high-resolution recordings — but at the same time prevents viewing of HDTV images on any TV or device not equipped with a copyright-protected HDMI digital input. That would eliminate any gain in image quality for HDTV early-adopters who bought displays prior to two or three years ago, when DVI and HDMI digital inputs were introduced.
Eklund noted that Sony’s key piracy concern isn’t with analog HDTV signals but with the digital HDTV signal coming off the disc, which both Blu-ray and HD DVD are protecting with the robust Advanced Access Content System (AACS) endorsed by the Hollywood studios. If analog copying does become a problem down the road, the policy could change, he said — but for now, “we have no plan to implement the Image Constraint Token. All of Sony’s titles will come out of the analog output at full definition.” He added that other studios still have the discretion to activate the token for all or individual titles.
Why is this important? My friend Willie blogged about this a few weeks ago:
Gina’s dad moved into a smaller house back in January and so didn’t have room for his 55″ projection HDTV anymore. He bought a nice 30″ flat-panel LCD HDTV and was generous enough to give us the old set. We quickly made room for it and have been enjoying high-definition goodness for weeks now.
On a screen that large, there is a stark difference between standard-definition and high-definition programming. Our DVD collection looks great in widescreen, but the movies aren’t as clear as what we can watch on HBO HD. Consequently, I’ve been keeping up on the development of high-definition DVD players more closely lately. This article on the SciFi Tech blog confirmed something I had feared for several weeks now: people who were excited about high-definition early on are going to be left out in the cold.
Good news for Willie and other early adopters. And everyone really. Kudos to Sony.