DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Welcome to another WNR. It’s getting colder here where I am, winter is certainly coming (in the southern hemisphere). Makes it just that much harder to get work started, especially on a Sunday.

Let’s get started anyway.

Aereo’s dime sized antennas – smart or too clever for their own good?

Trying to abide by copyright laws in the digital age can be tricky. Or rather, there are some tricky ways you can try to obey the letter of the law, if not exactly in spirit. Which is what Aereo’s business model seems like to me – completely legal (as tested in court, twice already), but does not quite pass the smell test.

For those that don’t know, Aereo allows subscribers to stream TV channels to their mobile devices, and even record programs to a cloud based DVR. Aereo gets around the “problem” of paying for a broadcast or re-transmission license by providing each subscriber with their own dime sized TV antennas, and each antenna is only used to provide content to one unique subscriber. So instead of broadcast or re-transmission, there’s a 1-to-1 relationship between each received signal and streamed or recorded content. It’s a technically sound and legal solution, but it’s seems to me like a ridiculous solution intended to be used as a loophole, and not a genuine piece of innovation.

Still, the only outcome I would want to see in the much publicized Aereo Supreme Court case is a victory for the start-up. With the lower courts and the appeals court already siding with Aereo, the Supreme Court would have to set new precedent, and do so in an incorrect way (not the first time with this court), to side with big business interests (again, not the first time with this court).

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Going to the cinemas and not get accosted by law enforcement is getting harder and harder these days it appears. While wearing a pair of Google Glass to the cinema (even if it is turned off, and only using it as normal prescription glasses) might be the very definition of asking for trouble, having a brick slider phone in your pocket is surely not going to attract any trouble, right? Well, an elderly woman in Provo Utah was not so lucky, accused of trying to record a movie with her “classic” phone and thrown out into the street for her troubles.

Is a slider phone like this a dangerous movie piracy tool?

The woman says the phone was in her pocket after her husband left half way through the movie and handed it to her. She was also using a closed captioning device, which may have been mistaken for recording equipment by whoever dobbed her in.

For me, even if she had been recording the movie on her phone, as long as it’s not disturbing other cinema goers, is it really such a big deal. The quality of the recording on a handheld phone, especially a classic slider style brick (probably only has a recording resolution of 640×480), is no threat to studios worried their films will end up online. The fact that the police officers who arrived to throw her out apparently did not find anything incriminating on the phone suggests no recording took place anyway.

So it looks this is a case of more collateral damage in the paranoid driven War on Piracy. Going to the cinemas has never been so dangerous, and it almost makes you wanna, I don’t know, download the movie and watch it at home or something. I mean, that’s what the studios are trying to achieve right? To scare people from going to the cinemas and making piracy look like the more attractive choice? No?

Sony has issued the strongest indication yet that physical media may be on the way out. The company wrote down nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of assets in its disc manufacturing business, including Blu-ray manufacturing, due to slowing demand. You can blame Netflix for that, I guess.

Blu-ray is unlikely to reach the sales highs that DVDs once enjoyed, but it’s not going away any time soon

Those that follow our weekly Blu-ray sales analysis will be able to spot the trend of a rapidly slowing DVD business, and a slower than expected take up of Blu-ray (unable to make up for the losses in DVD revenue). While Blu-ray is still growing in the US, it’s doing so slowly. Much of the growth in the home entertainment industry is coming from purely digital services like Netflix. And while both the PS4 and Xbox One is using Blu-ray discs for distributing games, even the gaming business is moving towards digital streaming and downloads. Sony has invested heavily in its digital distribution networks in recent times for both its media and gaming businesses, a sign that the company is fairly certain its predictions are correct.

So after considerably effort to win the HD format wars, which looks to have at the very least severely damaged the PS3’s chance to win the last generation wars, has Sony’s support for Blu-ray been worth it? While Blu-ray demand will not grow as quickly as the company had wanted, there is no evidence that Blu-ray is dying (how can there be when its demand is still growing?). And with Microsoft now firmly in the Blu-ray camp with the Xbox One, it’s pretty clear that Blu-ray will take over from DVDs as the dominant disc format. That, however, may be a hollow victory as people move away from discs altogether.

So Blu-ray’s peak will be a smaller peak that that of DVD’s, but it will still be around.

Well, I’ve definitely passed my peak for the day, so it’s time to call it. See you next week!

A very short WNR this week, and that’s partly my fault. I took part last night in Melbourne’s second annual White Night festival, and that and other distractions during the week meant that I just didn’t have time to scour the interwebs for interesting news stories. So as compensation, I present to you these creative commons licensed, rather common and uncreative photos of my own taking, of some scenes at White Night. This is probably the most interesting part of the WNR for this week, unfortunately.

Here’s goes anyway.

The Pirate Bay ship may soon sail unencumbered in the waters of the Netherlands, after the country’s second largest ISP forced anti-piracy agency BREIN to agree to a lifting of a ban on visits to the notorious piracy website. This comes after January’s ruling by The Court of The Hague which found that the banning was ineffective and anti-business.

The Pirate Bay blocking may be about to become history in the Netherlands

Other ISPs will probably follow suit (nobody wants to be at a competitive disadvantage), and could be the clearest signal yet that Dutch anti-piracy BREIN may be throwing in the towel when it comes to its website banning ambitions.

The Court of The Hague’s ruling was based on a report that found website bannings to be ineffective in stopping piracy, and also unfairly restricts ISPs’ freedom to conduct business. BREIN has yet to decide to appeal the ruling, but even if they do, it could take years for a final decision. To continue to ban The Pirate Bay during this time, when a court has already ruled against the banning, would not be in the best interest of anyone involved, even BREIN, and perhaps this is why BREIN agreed to the lifting (even though this court decision did not apply to the ISP in question, UPC).

I’m hoping this court ruling sets the right precedent and forces anti-piracy groups to rethink their strategy on website bannings, but I suspect it won’t. It’s not the first time that these anti-piracy crusaders have ignored facts and common sense in their pursuit of a victory against piracy, and so I don’t expect anything different this time.

You know it’s a slow news week when I have to talk about bacteria and other microorganisms in the HD/Blu-ray section. Ironically, this was actually the most interesting story of the week, as scientists have discovered a new way to use a Blu-ray player: for lab work!

Using a standard commercial Blu-ray disc and the Blu-ray player’s laser, scientist have found a way to use these to identify the type and concentration of bacteria, and to a degree of accuracy that matches much more expensive lab equipment.

I don’t know about you, this is one feature that I will demand to be part of my next Blu-ray player!

Well, that’s that for the week. I’ll try harder next week. I promise!