DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Some weeks you couldn’t buy a news story, this week, there’s enough for two weeks. Don’t really know why, perhaps the MPAA is upping their lobbying efforts, or the courts have resumed their cases, and parliaments are reconvened to pass new legislations. Who knows. On my end, I finished the review for WinDVD 2010 as promised. A summary? Well, I’d rather you read the full review, but suffice to say there are things that I like about WinDVD, and there are some things that its competitors have done that it has not. Is it a great Blu-ray player? Yes it is. Can it be better, that’s a yes too.

Copyright news first, and there are quite a few to go through. Right after my last WNR, news came that torrent tracker UK-T was shut down, and some kind of police action was involved, but as no anti-piracy agency had claimed responsibility at that time, nobody was really sure what went down. Still not really sure what happened, but from leaked reports, it suggest that the police had raided the homes of several of the site’s admins. The database was wiped before the police could get their hands on it, and so the subscribers are safe. One tracker down, only 362,621 to go.

Demonoid: Tracker back online. Database corruption, or something more sinister?

But while one torrent tracker was down, another came back up. Demonoid has been down for ages now, supposedly due to a database problem, but the tracker is at least up again, if not the main website. I’ve noticed that several torrent sites have experienced similar database problems recently, so it could be just a coincidence, or perhaps something more sinister? If it was just an accident, then these accidents have actually done more to stop torrent sites than all the legal actions. Take The Pirate Bay for example. The latest attempt to shut the site down, or at least prevent access to it in Norway, has failed. The entertainment lobby had asked the Norwegian court to get Norway’s largest ISP Telenor to shut down access to the torrent site, but the court said “Nei” as they didn’t think an ISP should be the one deciding which websites its customers get access to, and which it should block. And the implication of this ruling is that ISPs are not really responsible for what their customers get up to, since if they were, then the court would have told them to shut off access. To me, this is common sense,  and Telenor’s spokesman’s analogy of not being able to sue a ladder manufacturer because someone used the ladder to commit a burglary again seems to make sense to me. But common sense is in short supply these days when it comes to the copyright debate.

The failed attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay again deals another blow to the MPAA and their friends, but do they really want the torrent site to be shut down? According to a new study, they should be careful of what they wish for, because during the few days that The Pirate Bay was down, the number of torrent trackers and websites dramatically increased, and downloading continued. The way modern torrent clients work, even without a working tracker, downloads can continued thanks to a technology called DHT (Distributed Hashed Table), or so called trackerless downloads. The download speed is sometimes affected, but not always. And with TPB down, many sees it as an opportunity to become the new TPB, and so naturally, the number of torrent and trackers will surge during this period. It just shows how hard it is to actually try and stop file sharing, and I think it may actually be impossible. All the resources that have been spent on trying to stop file sharing seems like a big waste to me. And even more so when you consider the stats that show that people who download illegal songs actually spend more on music than those who don’t. This again seems like common sense to me, because people who download music (legally, or illegally) are the ones that love music, and many are using free downloads as a way to search for new songs and artists. This “buy before you try” argument has been made for other content as well, like games, although the percentage that converts from try to buy is rather low, nevertheless, there is a percentage. Music especially I think is something that you do need to try before you buy, that’s why we have radio stations that broadcast songs, for free. The music industry, and others, should be exploiting this phenomenon to their advantage instead of trying to shut it down. Spotify, the free online music service, seems to signal a possible future direction, basically taking the radio model online.

The MPAA's propaganda ministry is busy these days

There’s still more copyright news, we’re barely half way through. The MPAA has been busy lobbying the FCC for various things. And as a concerted campaign, they had the US 60 Minutes broadcast a copyright propaganda film that tried to link file sharing with organized crime. There are links between counterfeit goods and physical media piracy with organized crime, but online file sharing that’s mostly free? The downloading communism poster immediately springs to mind (see right). More propaganda as the MPAA says the Internet will die if piracy is not stopped. This is the same MPAA that has been trying to kill the Internet for ages now, that its members and supporters have publicly stated their wish that the Internet had never existed, so why are they so worried about its health now? And the MPAA is not just happy pushing their agenda on the US, they’re going global as well. You can just see their dirty fingerprints over the proposed copyright treaty that will be discussed in South Korea this month. The worst part is that the treaty is being kept super top secret, even though it affects everyone. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, part of the discussions were leaked and it was indeed what we fear most. Three-strikes, global DMCA, ISP policing … are just some of the MPAA’s favourite things, and all will be tabled at the secret discussions later this month. Sigh.

Sarkozy's defence of major US corporations' interests has even led to a fight with the EU

Three-strikes and ISP policing, very popular at the moment, but the EU has decided that something needs to be done to protect consumer rights, even if what they did was not nearly enough. But it’s a start. The EU has decided that Internet access is a basic right, and as such, cutting people’s connections off will require more than just an email from the MPAA. The EU has ruled that a fair process must be in place before bannings can occur, which is less than the full criminal trial that consumer and Internet advocates had first wanted. This all came after France wanted to introduce something that legalized their three-strikes plan (the original one that didn’t require the judicial system, which their own constitutional council found to be, well, unconstitutional), and that angered pretty much everyone at the EU, and the battle has been fought ever since, leading to this latest compromise. Just what has happened to France, a country that I’ve always considered to be quite liberal and would usually be at the front lines fighting *against* the three-strikes nonsense, and not on the side of mega US corporations. Freedom and liberty is also another thing I associate with France, but they just seem to be one the wrong side of that as well because time and time again, it has been shown that copyright laws have been abused to stifle free speech and the critics of corporations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even has a Hall of Shame for the companies and organizations that have abused copyright laws for their own (non copyright related) benefits. It just shows that when laws are so biased towards one side, they are prime candidates for abuse. And for me it’s hard to digest the fact that a country like France is in there arguing to make these laws even more one sided, and even more open to abuse. But with a guy like Sarkozy at the helm, now using the nations divisions for his political gain, no one expect anything less really. Hall of shame indeed.

The global DMCA thing is particularly annoying, although not that much of an impact since most countries have adopted some draconian form of it. One country is Denmark, and one citizen is doing his unique way of protesting the illogical nature of the laws. Under the DMCA, or the Danish equivalent, any attempt (even unsuccessful) at breaking DRM is considered illegal. However, Danish law allows for DVDs to be ripped for legal home use, and so the two Danish laws actually conflict each other. This is why Henrik Andersen confessed his “crimes” of ripping hundreds of his legally purchased DVDs for use in his home theater setup, to a Danish anti-piracy agency. Under the DMCA, Mr Andersen is guilty and should be fined, if not jailed. But just whose interests has he actually hurt? Certainly not the movie studios that he purchased his DVDs from.

Still more copyright stuff, bear with me. The third week of the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial continues, and please refer to my summary forum post to keep yourself updated on this rather important trial, possibly the most important in the world right now concerning the copyright issue, as it seeks to decide if ISPs should be turned into copyright cops.

And in all this bad news, there’s a glimmer of hope for a fair solution that everyone can live with. Google/YouTube is finding that their compromise solution to the copyright issue, of sharing revenue with content owners if they choose not to remove stuff from YouTube, might be working. And working well, as a third of all their YouTube revenue is coming from this trial program. And it’s not just the extra revenue, the exposure on YouTube leads to more business opportunities for content owners, like the case of Mr Bean, the popular UK comedy series, in which the content owners decided to keep the user uploaded clips online, as opposed to removing it, and then found that it actually led to deals with TV stations countries that have never heard of Mr Bean before. So a bit of technical piracy actually led to a successful TV deal, and all while still making money from YouTube  profit sharing. And yet others, like Viacom, are still hell bent on suing YouTube into oblivion. Shorted sighted or what?

Well that was a big section wasn’t it. On to HD news now, although it’s still copyright related, I’m afraid. Managed Copy, the so called legal solution to movie ripping, will soon be upon us. December 4th marks the date that MC becomes a reality on Blu-ray.

Managed Copy in a Pioneer demo for the movie Bolt

I’m excited about MC, because it signals the first step that the movie industry has taken to legitimize the need for people to be able to separate the movie from the disc that it came on. With today’s increasingly digital world and sophisticated home theater solutions, being able to have everything as pure digital data is increasingly useful. Imagine having all your DVD and Blu-ray movies stored digitally and accessible with a few clicks of your remote. It makes categorizing easier, searching even more so, and it will be faster as well, and quieter due to the lack of a spinning optical drive. But to make this reality requires you to break several laws at the moment, but MC might be just what is needed to solve this problem.

But while I’m excited, the movie studios are less so apparently, as there’s just no support for MC despite the December 4th deadline. I suppose this is something whose success and popularity will only be apparent after it has been introduced, and just like the “Digital Copy” feature that the movie studios have only now grown to love, it’s going to take a time before they overcome their fears. And this could be the feature to keep Blu-ray in the game when it eventually goes head to head with digital distribution  (with Best Buy the latest to get into the digital download market). Whether you get it from the Internet, or from a USB stick, or on a Blu-ray disc, in the end, it’s the digital movie that’s important, not the way it arrives to your home. And for HD content, Blu-ray disc (sent via the postal system) may still be the best solution, from a cost and even speed perspective (see pigeon test).

And lastly in gaming, Sony’s losses from the PS3 have now topped $4.6 billion. But Sony is hoping to add perhaps a couple of more billions to this figure, as the more they lose, it means the more PS3 consoles they are selling, and that’s a good thing for them in the long term, if extremely hurtful in the short. In the post I made there are also links to the losses being made by Nintendo and Microsoft. The amazing figures for Nintendo, in which they’ve been in profit every year since the stats were first available, shows that even though they’ve had a few failed consoles in between, their strategy of concentrating on fun first, and technology second, is still paying off.

And that’s the news for this week. I’m willing to bet that next week will be super quiet as news sources regurgitate this week’s news items in various flavours. Oh, I got my graphics card back from warranty (the first one, with the broken fan). It’s now working great and the average temperature was about 10 degrees (Celsius) lower than when I first got the card, meaning that even when the fan was spinning, it was still overheating.

It’s November already. 60 something days until 2010 is here, and not long to go until 2012, the end of the world. I’m talking about the movie of course, which is in cinemas in 2 weeks time and I already have the trailer made and ready for upload. Speaking of trailers, I’ve been uploading them with a bit more regularity recently, and I’ve ensured all of them are now 1080p resolution (H.264 video, AAC audio) – you can find them all in our movies section. I’ve also made sure they’re all Xbox 360 and PS3 compatible, meaning they’ll play on these consoles without the need for further conversion. This means limited audio (no 5.1 audio, and LC only), but the original source files for most of them come only with stereo tracks anyway. A pet peeve I still have is that many H.264/AAC files that you find on the Net are not PS3/Xbox 360 compatible without further processing – both consoles, the PS3 in particular, make excellent media centers without the complexity, and if more files are compatible without transcoding or editing, it makes the whole process a lot easier. Anyway, the news, not much going on again, but I’ll turn up the rant knob to 11 and hopefully that will be enough.

Let’s start with the copyright news. Anti-piracy or anti-terrorism? Which is more important? Now this might seem a fairly straightforward question to answer, but it isn’t so in the UK.

Britain's spy agency is against the three-strikes anti-piracy law

The country’s chief intelligence agency, MI5, has come out against the government’s plan to implement a three-strikes anti-piracy legislation. And the police are siding with them as well. It’s not so much that they’re against the notion of anti-piracy, it’s just that the means in which the government wants to pursue it will make their anti-crime and national security operations much much more difficult. The reason is that by making your average ISP a spying organisation, it also makes every Net enabled citizen the subject of spying, and it’s not the secretive kind either, it’s all out in the open. This will then force even the average Joe to adopt better security to overcome this spying, which effectively means encrypted Internet connections might become the norm. This thus makes police and intelligence agencies’ work much harder, as even “listening” in on to characters of minor importance might mean an expensive and time consume decryption process. And of course, the encryption means that the anti-piracy operation will also fail. So the government has a choice to make, to either protect the country from real criminals or to go after kids who download three MP3s. The government, unfortunately, seems to have chosen the latter, and they plan to have the banning system up and running by 2011. I guess the anti-terrorism and crime lobby just doesn’t have the pull of the pro-copyright one.

The immediate plan is to introduce a warning system in the UK, where ISPs spend huge amounts of money spying on its own customers and send those suspect of piracy warning letters. If this plan doesn’t reduce piracy by 70% by April 2011, an impossible target (and possibly a deliberately chosen impossible one), then the banning penalty will be introduced. For those in the UK that plan on passively protesting this, might I suggest that you increase your piracy activities so that by April 2011, piracy will not only have not reduced, but have actually increased thanks to the warnings. Of course, I would never condone piracy, so delete those illegal files after you download them please, but this again highlights another flaw in the proposed system. Even if you do as I suggest and delete the pirated file immediately after download, you will have been recorded as having downloaded the illegal file, yet you did not use it and did not even intend to use it. Under the proposed system, intent appears to not matter, nor does actual usage of the pirated materials – the fact that you downloaded it is enough. Except it isn’t, not under any fair legal system. Further reason to protest, so Britains, download away (and delete right afterwards, of course).

If piracy means less movies like All About Steve, then that's just a bonus

The charm offensive, if you can call it that (although I do call it “offensive”), has already started from the movie studios. This week, it’s Sony Picture’s CEO writing a blog about just how bad piracy is and how it hurts the poor multi-billion dollar corporations. Hurts them so much that, they might even make less movies. And they have made less movies, apparently. Yet they have still made record profits, even in an economic downturn, so what exactly is going on here? Perhaps they’re making less crappy movies because the power of the Internet, a system designed for word of mouth type communications, has meant that crappy movies are spotted as such and flounder at the box office much faster than previously (see Bruno, and the tweets that might have savaged its box office earnings). There’s much less room, and much less tolerance for crappy movies these days. And the alternative source for releasing them is straight to DVD/Blu-ray, which I’m not sure if the movie studio CEO counts as a produced movie. Then there’s also the rising budget for movies, which leaves less for others to be made. And the credit crisis has meant that movie funding hasn’t been as free flowing as in the past. Yeah, but let’s blame it all on piracy shall we?

Of the various trials, many of them are on a break at the moment. The Pirate Bay trial, or appeals trial, has been delayed until next year as reported recently, but the movie studios aren’t happy that The Pirate Bay will still be operational until then. So they have asked the Swedish court to fine the founders of the website if they do not close it. The only problem is that the founders have consistently denied any further involvement in the running of the website, and so the website will probably remain open, if the founders get fined.

Enough copyright stuff, let’s move onto HD. If you don’t have a Blu-ray player, but want one, then the upcoming holiday sales may be just what you need. Rumours suggest that Blu-ray players will be available for as low as $49 for this year’s Black Friday sales.

Now I wouldn’t recommend you buy these players. They’re mostly superseded Profile 1.0 and 1.1 players – Profile 1.1 is still okay if you don’t need the Internet features, or video streaming service support, but 1.0 players really shouldn’t even exist on the market anymore.

But even the fully featured Profile 2.0 players can be had for less than $100, although those wanting to make their own Blu-ray movies or AVCHD/custom discs, might need to do a bit more research on just which cheap player is for them.

Netflix is coming to the PS3, first via a Blu-ray disc

But if you have a bit more cash lying around, then you might consider a PS3, because Netflix will soon be available on the console. At first, it would be a (free) Blu-ray disc with a BD-Live connection to Netflix to drive the service, but eventually, a built-in service will be available. With the recent price drops, the PS3 still represents good value as a Blu-ray player and media center, especially compared to name brand players with comparable features. This is good news for supporters of the next generation of home video (the one after Blu-ray), which many believe to be digital distribution.

This move, obviously a way to play catch up on the digital distribution front that has been spearheaded by the Xbox 360 in terms of game consoles, may also signal Sony’s reluctant move towards digital distribution. Sony will always prefer their own in house solution, using proprietary formats, and Netflix has made huge strides in the area, thanks to Blu-ray players and the Xbox 360, and Sony may not have any other choice other than to embrace a third party service. And while this won’t really hurt Blu-ray, it has the potential to do so in the future. Netflix has already said so themselves that their streaming service is gaining at the expense of the disc rental side, and once HD streaming becomes a reality (mainly waiting on bandwidth, at the moment), then the good old optical disc (and the mechanical drives that read them) might then seem quite quaint.

There’s not much gaming news that I found interesting, so I’ll keep on going with this Netflix on PS3 thing. Many have come out to say that this is a huge blow to the Xbox 360, since Netflix has been exclusive on it up until now. And since the PS3 is a better media center, which I agree thanks to its low noise, this means that the Xbox 360 will lose or something. The only problem with this argument is that Netflix isn’t exclusive to the Xbox 360, and has never been. Blu-ray players have it, your PC obviously supports it, and there were many ways to get Netflix streaming without having to use the Xbox 360. And just how many people have actually bought Xbox 360’s because it had Netflix? This isn’t a victory for the PS3 or a defeat for the Xbox 360, it’s just simply a victory for Netflix and for digital distribution. And to further drive the point, the world’s most popular home video game console doesn’t even play DVDs, let alone have any sort of media center ambitions.

And the other interesting line I heard over the week is that the recent PS3 successes is good news for PS3 owners. I think it’s good for Sony, but I’m not sure how well the PS3’s success translates to being good news for PS3 owners, especially those who shelled out full price for the console a few months before the price drop. I guess in the short terms, there will be more users for the multiplayer games. And more buyers may mean cheaper games, but that’s a highly questionable assumption. Will there be more games for the PS3? Or rather, would the PS3 have gotten less games if it had been less successful? Probably not, as the PS3 was never in danger of dying in the same way as the Sega Dreamcast. Will PS3 games be of higher quality? Possibly, but that’s more to do with developers still learning to get the best out of the PS3, as opposed to not bothering to put in the effort. But it is good news for those invested in the phony console war, to have their decisions justified, even though they can justify it everyday themselves by using it and  having fun on it. Just like those who purchased and thoroughly enjoyed their Dreamcasts.

So on that note, have a great week, enjoy and appreciate every minute, because 2012 isn’t that far away (not talking about the movie).

Not a busy weeks in terms of news, but a busy for me in any case. I wrote up the NPD September 2009 video games sales analysis on Tuesday. A very big month for Sony as the PS3 becomes number one for the first time ever, although Microsoft will be happy to dominate total sales, especially with software. Nintendo will be concerned, and will hope that the PS3 numbers are at a temporary high due to the release of the new Slim SKU. But then later on in the week, my computer‘s graphic card’s fan stopped working, and so I had to quickly buy a replacement while I wait for warranty service. A blessing in disguise perhaps since I was about 2 weeks away from the end of the warranty period. Anyway, I got Radeon 4550 as a temporary replacement which I can then use in a new home theater PC build sometime next year. The best thing about the card is that it’s a passive one, no fans that will make noises and then break and force me to get a replacement. The computer is a bit more quieter than it was before, and sometimes I have to check twice just to make sure it is actually on. This card should work great in a home theater system, and I tested Blu-ray playback (see earlier test) and CPU usage was still very low, hovering at under 10% under PowerDVD 9. Gaming performance is average as you would expect, but still playable. Anyway, onto the news, which as I mentioned before, was few and far between due to various factors (such as the launch of Windows 7).

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeals trial should now be delayed until next year. This is because of the bias allegations that the TPB defence team has filed against two of the judges that were supposed to sit on the case. TPB had earlier requested a delay which was rejected, so they get what they want now anyway.

And believe it or not, this was pretty much all the news I managed to find. Sure, there were lots about MPAA’s boss saying he will quit next year when his contract runs out, but that was sort of covered in last week’s WNR in regards to the MPAA restructuring due to the studios’ assertion that the MPAA has been too soft. A few others have already left as a result.

You can tell it’s a quiet week piracy wise because when you search for piracy on Google News, most of the news stories were about the maritime kind. And maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be. Copyright holders like to make a big fuss about online piracy, but compared to what’s going on over in Somalia, I mean, it’s pretty non consequential. When I think of the Somalian pirates, I think of the “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy ads – heck, not only would they steal the car, they’ll steal the cargo ship the car was being transported on as well, get the crew’s DVD library, rip them, and upload them onto The Pirate Bay just for fun. Now that’s piracy!

Disney's "Keychest" sells you viewing rights, not just the movie files

And then there’s this story about Disney’s new Keychest initiative. Upon the first read, it seems just like another pointless DRM exercise, but this one might lead to something interesting, maybe even revolutionary. When you buy a movie today, you are not actually buying anything other than the movie in a particular format. And unless you get a digital copy with it, it’s pretty much locked to that format. Some argue you should be able to rip it and then convert it into another format, but if you read the license stuff and observe the US DMCA (or your country’s equivalent), then ripping it would be very much illegal. So if the digital copy was not present or isn’t iPod compatible, then to get an iPod version, you’ll have to buy it through iTunes, despite the fact that you may already have purchased the movie on Blu-ray and DVD (very likely if you’re buying a Disney Blu-ray, which usually comes with the DVD version now).

The idea behind Keychest is that instead of you buying a movie locked to a format, you simply buy a license to watch the movie, regardless of the format. Using this license, which can come in the form of a digital key or certificate, you can then download various versions of the movie for various formats. The key might come bundled with the Blu-ray/DVD version of the movie, allowing you to download the iPod version from the Internet. And, from what I’ve read, you can have multiple copies and each can be played simultaneously (obviously there would be some limit, as you don’t want one key to be able to supply the entire world with access to the movie).

Why is this a good idea? I’ve always thought that buying a movie means you’re buying the viewing rights anyway, and that you should be able to transcode it to another format. This holds true for CD to MP3 ripping, for example, but does not hold true for Blu-ray and DVD simply because there is copy protection mechanisms in the way. But buying a license technically means that regardless of where you sourced the movie, you have the right to view it since you’ve paid for it, even if the source may be of a less than legal kind. Of course, the license could limit you to downloading the movie from approved sources, for legal or commercial reasons, but you are again locked into buying formats, the only difference being that you have more choice over which format to get it on. But for a true revolution, it should mean that as long as you have a license, you can download it from anywhere, or perhaps even offer an exception that allows you to break the copy protection on discs to get the movie into the format you want. And it would all remain legal. Of course, the license may cost more than the cost of your average DVD, but such a license would also mean that you can supply your various devices and your immediate family’s various devices with copies of the movie, a “home license” if you will, and that would be very convenient indeed. And to extend things further, how about a yearly license subscriptions that allows you to enjoy all Disney movies being released for the home video market for the year?

Buy why is it also a bad idea? In one word? Control. With Keychest, you may end up giving more control over to the studios as to how you watch movies. Because while a “home license” is a good thing, the opposite means that for those without this kind of license, or those who simply purchased the DVD version and not the Keychest license, then trying to do anything other than to watch the DVD in your DVD player could be illegal. Right now, you can argue that since there’s no legal alternative, you have to rip the DVD and make a version for your portable media player. With Keychest being the legal alternative, you won’t have this argument anymore. But that’s not really a huge problem since ripping a DVD is already illegal anyway. The bigger problem is that Keychest is still another form of DRM, and that means while you may be given a huge amount of freedom with this new kind of licensing scheme, that freedom is still being “given” to you by the studios, and something given can be taken away. If Disney one day finds that Keychest is losing them a lot of money, then they can simply pull the authentication servers, and those with Keychest licenses will find them useless. This is the pitfall of all DRM schemes.

DRM free, monthly subscription, all you can download, unlimited viewing and access to all back catalogues through your set top box, game console, PC or iPod/iPhone. Now that’s what I call real freedom.

Let’s move onto high def news. I did the Blu-ray sales analysis last week, and Blu-ray sales were way up as expected. I deliberately chose not to look at the DVD sales numbers since I wanted to concentrate on how Blu-ray was doing, but when one does take into account the DVD numbers, the news isn’t as rosy.

While Blu-ray sales are up 66% compared to a year ago, Blu-ray and DVD sales combined are actually down 13.9%. What has been observed is that the drop in DVD sales has been way faster than any growth on Blu-ray, and that the industry is still hemorrhaging. I theorized before that Blu-ray might actually be partially causing the decline in DVD sales, as people upgrade their equipment and buy more expensive movies leaves then with less cash to buy movies that are not what you would call “must have’s”, especially during these economic times. I for one have cut down my movie buying to a minimum, still buying Blu-ray’s and the occasional $5 DVD movies, but I can’t justify buying “meh” movies just because they’re on sale anymore, not when I’ve just paid full price for a copy of Taken on Blu-ray. So even just looking at my own buying habits, Blu-ray sales (buys) are way up, and DVD sales are way down, and I probably end up spending less on movies as a result. Which is good, because I’d rather spend the money on video games anyway. And there in lies the problem.

DeadLands 2: The last movie to be released on HD DVD?

And then there was the whole HD DVD disaster, which wasted the time, effort and money of a lot of people, although for simple movie viewing, it was a great time and it still is if you can grab some HD DVD movies for as low as $1. Some who supported HD DVD from the get go will have lost confidence in the home video industry that allowed this sort of thing to happen (again). Those who got into HD DVD after its fall to take advantage of the fire sales, like myself, are still somewhat satisfied, but certainly won’t bother to re-buy those movies on Blu-ray again, especially when most of these movies were hardly the “must-have” variety. Either way, the whole thing a negative effect on Blu-ray and on DVD at time when it could least afford to lose more ground to video games and new forms of entertainment. But I bring up HD DVD again as it’s near to Halloween, and it has risen from the grave, sort of, for one more time at least. A new movie is being released on the dead format, and suitably, it is a zombie movie. It’s a limited collector’s edition as well, numbered and comes with a certificate and everything. The movie, DeadLands 2, is not available on Blu-ray.

And speaking of rising from death, that old “Xbox 360’s gonna have a Blu-ray drive, OGM LOL” rumour has surfaced again. This time after a misquote from Steve Ballmer, possibly taken out of context, where he was supposed to have said “you’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories”. But he was referring to the PC (in relation to Windows 7’s launch), and not the Xbox 360, but it didn’t take long for the Net to be filled with headlines of “Microsoft CEO: Xbox 360 definitely getting Blu-ray drive”. Definitely!

Ballmer said in the same interview that “the future of movies is on-demand, actually, as opposed to distribution via physical media”, which I think tells you all you need to know about Microsoft’s strategy on movies. Downloads Yes. Discs, Blu-ray in particular, No. But Windows 7 supports Blu-ray burning out of the box (although you’ll still need a software Blu-ray player to play Blu-ray movies, perhaps taking advantage of the 70% Off WinDVD Pro 2010 deal that’s available right now – a deal that was leaked, but linked to the launch of Windows 7), so Microsoft is not abandoning the format in any way. It just doesn’t see the Xbox 360 needing it.

I don’t know why this rumour gets thrown about every couple of months. There’s almost no demand from Xbox 360 users for a Blu-ray drive accessory, especially considering how cheap a standalone Blu-ray player is these days, not to mention how much better even a cheap standalone would be compared to playing movies on a game console (Sony PS3 is only acceptable with the remote add-on, but “serious” HT people still scoff at it’s lack of bitstreaming of the original PS3, its looks and the lack of an LCD display). It seems there are certain segments of the public that would view having Blu-ray on the Xbox 360 as the ultimate concession of defeat by the HD DVD group (which no longer even exists, btw), and by Microsoft for supporting the ill fated format. Toshiba’s indirect issue of a “mea culpa”, by releasing their first Blu-ray player, wasn’t enough apparently. And it’s not just admitting defeat on the HD DVD front, but if Microsoft does go Blu, then it vindicates Sony’s decision to include the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 at the cost of delays, huge losses, and slowed market penetration. Microsoft will point to their 2:1 sales lead (albeit a diminishing lead if September’s video games sales results become a norm) as vindication that not giving a crap about a built-in HD movie disc player was the right decision. The funny thing is that nobody accosts Nintendo for not even including a DVD player in the Wii, despite it having a DVD drive. Where are the rumours that the Wii is getting a software update or a Wii Shop purchase that enables DVD playback, as that would be much more believable in my opinion.

And moving on finally to gaming, despite having moved into this area about two paragraphs ago, the PS3 firmware kills the Blu-ray drive story continues, not just in court, but also with some independent PS3 fans and developers/hackers wanting people’s dead PS3s so they can do their stuff and determine just why they brick after a new firmware update.

A group is taking the PS3 apart to find out why firmware updates brick it (possibly not literally though)

They have already narrowed their suspicions down to a file that is part of the firmware package, which updates the Blu-ray drive’s firmware. Firmware updates are dangerous. The frequency in which Sony releases firmware updates has always been a cause for concern, as is their strategy of “adding value to the PS3 through software”. It’s good in theory, but you better make damn sure you do enough beta testing, on all SKUs, and to put in safeguards to prevent a bad firmware update bricking the machine. But with the frequency of updates, and the jumble of hardware (even under the same SKU), I can’t see a way for Sony to be able to ensure their firmware is 100% safe. And despite so many updates, none of them were even as big in sale (in terms of changes) as the New Xbox Experience update. The PS3 interface still looks pretty much the same as the one that came with the launch machine, except now some of these PS3s won’t play any discs at all anymore. And it’s also important to differentiate between a firmware update and a software update. With game consoles, the lines more blurred than compared to say Windows, since the hardware is much more specialised and linked with the software (hence the need for firmware). Software updates can be frequent, but firmware updates should be kept to a minimum.

It would be really interesting to know what the repair process is for this kind of problem at Sony tech support. If they’re simply ripping out the drive and replacing it with a new one, then it’s probably a hardware issue with the drive. And I’ve theorized before that the firmware simply detects faulty drives and turn them off to prevent further damage, so it’s not a case where the firmware causes the drive to fail – the drives were already failing to begin with. Another theory is that the firmware update process is buggy on certain drive models, not the actual firmware itself. But if the repair process is simply some kind of low level hardware reset, and if they’re charging people $150 (or $250 here in Australia) for that, then well, that’s not very nice. Maybe this is the sort of thing that will be revealed in the court case, if it proceeds.

And that’s it for the week. Thanks for reading, but no need for burning afterwards though. It’s bad the for environment!

As 2009 winds down, the video gaming industry is actually just getting started. From now onwards, you will see huge increases in video game sales from month to month, but with the economic situation as it is, comparison with previous years may still point to a disappointing holiday season. But there are other factors at play here, most noticeably Sony’s new PS3 Slim, and the corresponding price cuts for all the home based consoles. So September 2009 is an extremely interesting month where the stats will tell us a lot about whether 2009 can be salvaged, or whether it will remain a disappointing year on the video gaming front. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.

The figures for US sales in September 2009 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (September 2008 figures also shown, including percentage change):

NPD September 2009 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of September 2009)

My prediction from last month was:

So for a concrete prediction, I would say the PS3 to outsell the Xbox 360 and the Wii, and the number three being contested between the Xbox 360 and the Wii (too close to call, at this point). The PSP Go is coming in October, so we won’t see the numbers until November. Halo 3: ODST should top the charts next month, followed by Wii Sports Resort. The Beatles game should sell well too, although the Wii SKU may outsell the PS3/Xbox 360 ones.  At least one SKU of Batman: AA should still chart, although whether it’s the Xbox 360 or the PS3 version is too close to call at the moment as well (Xbox 360 users will be fully occupied by Halo 3: ODST to think about buying other games, I feel).

Mostly right, a couple of minor mistakes. As predicted and expected, the PS3 managed to beat the Wii to second place, but it wasn’t enough to unseat the DS as the number one selling game console. I predicted that the Wii and Xbox 360 would be neck and neck, which wasn’t the case, but when I made the prediction, Nintendo had not yet announced the Wii price cut which helped it to at least hold on to third place. The software predictions are mostly correct, even down to the uncertainty as to which platform for Batman: AA was going to win (it was the PS3, beating the Xbox 360 version that finished just outside of the top 10). The Wii version of The Beatles: Rock Band did not outsell the Xbox 360 version though.

So the big news of course are the PS3 numbers, which are simply put, head and shoulders, and a couple of body length, above last month pre-price cut/Slim numbers. There is a seasonal bump from August to September – one can work out just how much by looking at the PSP/PS2 numbers, which weren’t affected by new models or price cuts – this seasonal bump turns out to be around 35%.  Now taking this into account, the PS3 numbers are still about a 100% improvement compared to last month, and this is the amount that the Slim and price cut contributed. Now, how much of it was Slim based, and how much of it was price cut based, is impossible to tell with the numbers I have. The PS3 numbers are also a 112% improvement upon last year’s numbers, which is quite amazing. However, the jump in sales may only be a temporary spike, and it will be useful  to see next month’s numbers before coming to any conclusions. There won’t be a sales drop next month compared to this one, as the holiday season heats up and increases sale naturally, but the question would be how close Wii and Xbox 360 sales are to the PS3, whether the PS3 can hold on to second place or even get first. What is clear though is that the combination of a price cut and a new PS3 model has revived the flagging fortunes of the PS3, although whether this kicks of a period where the PS3 starts to dominate, or whether the Wii and Xbox’s market saturation will prevent this dominance, is a question that can only be answered in a few month’s time.

The biggest loser, and why total hardware sales are still down compared to the same time last year (despite the positive PS3 numbers), is the Wii. Another month in which the Wii managed to sell less than the same time last year, this time by 33%, is just not good enough for Nintendo. The price cut came a bit late to make a huge difference, so Nintendo will hope that its full effects will be felt next month. But what has driven Wii sales, the novelty factor, is starting to wear off. And it will only get worse as Sony and Microsoft debut their own motion systems, especially Microsoft’s Natal which seems a lot more “next-gen” than either the Wii or the PS3 motion controller.

Microsoft, now the least popular of the home consoles, may seem like the biggest loser, but if you look closely at this month’s numbers, they still have something to be happy with. While I don’t think the Xbox 360 Elite is priced competitively enough to combat the PS3, and I don’t think the Arcade can battle with the Wii, it’s clear that by having these two price points, Microsoft want to take on both Sony and Nintendo. It’s not working too well. What would have made more sense was to drop the Pro bundle to Arcade prices, get rid of the HDD-less Arcade model, and price the Elite at much less than the PS3 Slim. But you do get the feeling that any price cut is only a temporary measure until Microsoft unveil Natal, which should push it ahead of the PS3 and the Wii in terms of the novelty factor at least. But as I mentioned above, the other numbers, which is basically the software numbers, are quite encouraging actually, obviously helped by the platform exclusive Halo 3: ODST. In fact, 32% of the total video gaming revenue belonged to Microsoft products (hardware, software and accessories) this month, the single most contribution of any console. For the top 10 software, Microsoft dominated with 64.7% of the revenue, the most dominant performance since I started collecting data, even beating the month when Wii Fit was released in which Nintendo dominated with 61% of the top 10. So it’s not all bad news, and the lead they’ve built up over the PS3 over the last few years should allow them to keep their lead for at least another couple of years, and that’s assuming the PS3 performs as well as this month from now on.

So let’s move onto the software stats. My prediction of Halo 3: ODST and Wii Sports Resort occupying the number 1 and 2 spots respectively was a pretty easy one to make, and it was correct. Halo 3: ODST’s numbers were amazing, making it the 6th best selling SKU launch of all time, very good for a title that was only available on one platform, and an add-on to boot. There was room for 4 more Xbox 360 titles in the top 10. The only slight point of concern was that the PS3 version of Batman: AA outsold the Xbox 360 version, something that rarely happens for multi-platform releases, but the PS3 version did have exclusive content, and as I said last month, the Xbox 360 gamers might have been too busy with ODST to think about Batman: AA. There were only two Wii games in the top 10, gone are the days when Wii Play, Wii Fit and Mario Kart would all make regular appearances. These games have had a good run, but if Wii software sales are to improve, then the platform needs a string of must-have third-party games. Forget about a string, there hasn’t been even a couple of third-party Wii games that can be called “must-have”, so that’s a worrying point for Nintendo. For the PS3, the hardware bump did not translate over to software, with only two titles in the top 10. Madden NFL 10 on the PS3 did well to bridge the gap between it and the Xbox 360 version, but even the Wii version of the Beatles Rock Band game outsold the PS3 version, and so it did not place in the top 10. And as mentioned before, Batman: AA was the other PS3 entry in the top 10, beating the Xbox 360 version which finished 11th (sales figures unknown, but probably just over 200,000, and maybe about 10,000 copies short of the PS3 version). Microsoft’s dominance meant a 64.7% share of the top 10, with the Wii  getting 16.8% (plus 6.7% for the single DS game in the list), and the PS3 on 11.8%.

Here’s the complete list of the top 10 software sales:

1. Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360, Microsoft) – 1,520,000
2. Wii Sports Resort (Wii, Nintendo) – 442,900
3. Madden NFL 10 (Xbox 360, EA) – 289,600
4. Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (DS, Nintendo) – 258,100
5. The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox 360, EA) – 254,000
6. Madden NFL 10 (PS3, EA) – 246,500
7. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (Xbox 360, Activision) – 236,000
8. Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3, Eidos) – 212,500
9. Guitar Hero 5 (Xbox 360, Activision) – 210,800
10. The Beatles: Rock Band (Wi, EA) – 208,600

It’s time to make a prediction of October 2009’s results. For my money, I’ll say that the order of the hardware sales will remain the same, although the Wii numbers will be closer to the PS3 numbers. The PSP Go debuts, but based on an Australian report about the poor sales figures (a couple of hundred sales per week in an entire country, is not the best), the impact of the PSP Go may be muted. Sony will continue to have good month, but this time backed up in software sales as well with Uncharted 2. It might not sell enough to top the number one title, which might be Wii Sports Resort. Wii Fit Plus might take a place in the top half of the charts as well. I expect FIFA 10 to show up in one of more flavors in the top 10. Borderlands might make a showing too.

See you next month.

It’s been a busy week news wise, so there’s no problem at all filling up the 2,000 odd words required, I mean necessary, for this edition of the Weekly News Roundup. However, as I was feeling quite the stats nerd during the week, I decided to get out the spreadsheet software and then tabulate and graph the Blu-ray sales that I’ve been gathering since May 2008, you know, just for fun. The analysis doesn’t contain too many surprises, but for those who want to know just how much Blu-ray sales have increased, it may be worth a read. Anyway, on to the news, of which there’s quite a few.

Starting with copyright news, anti-piracy has become a real business, that’s not too surprising. But has the business of fighting piracy become more profitable than actually stopping piracy?

That’s what one anti-piracy firm thinks, and it even made a presentation showing just how more profitable it can be, for them and content owners alike, to allow piracy to continue and to make money off it by suing people, or threatening to sue them, for copyright infringement. They estimate that a quarter of all people they scare pay the penalty that they’ve arbitrarily set, and each successful claim is worth hundreds of legitimate downloads in terms of profit. This follows a rather candid interview that was given by a similar anti-piracy outfit not too long ago, where they revealed that they’ve put out content on P2P networks to lure people in, and they’ll only go after the people who they can make a good profit from. Stopping piracy, seems to be a distant second objective to making a bundle of cash by exploiting people’s fears about going to court, people’s lack of knowledge of the law, and the anti-piracy crusade that content owners are hell bent on pursuing. And your government is not only allowing it, but probably helping and profiting from it as well. Is this really acceptable?

Speaking of governments and unacceptable practices, have you heard about the proposed anti-counterfeiting/piracy treaty, that will be discussed in South Korea next month by several leading countries. The plans that could cause your iPod or laptop to be searched at the airport for suspect pirated content, or make file sharing illegal, or use legislation to turn ISPs into copyright cops? You haven’t heard of it? Well, that’s no surprising, because the US government is making sure nobody knows about the proposals until they’ve been passed, citing “national security” reasons. Only a handful of selected individuals were privy to what’s on the agenda, and even they had to sign non-disclosure agreements beforehand. Has counterfeiting and piracy, and not even the kind that takes place on the seas, become such a major issue that it’s being treated in the way as the war against terrorism or the war against drugs, and no public discussion is even allowed on the subject? Incidentally both of the wars I’ve mentioned just now seems to be the never ending types of which winning is all but a distant dream at the moment – a glimpse into the future of the war against downloads perhaps.

Ringtones are a public performance, just one of the many zany things that the ASCAP claims

But before the governments can agree on how long to lock people up in Gitmo for downloading the latest Miley Cyrus album or a screener of Zombieland, the RIAA and MPAA have to do things the hard way. One method they’ve tried before is to attack BitTorrent networks, using techniques such as “piece attack” and “connection attack”, both of which designed to frustrate the downloading experience for other users. However, a study has shown that despite the millions of dollars given to anti-piracy firms to implement these methods, they do not work, and at best, they are a minor annoyance to downloads for only a couple of minutes. More millions down the drain, millions that could have been used to give people what they want, which is cheap, accessible music and movies. Instead, they’re doing things like trying to get royalties from ringtones, or to charge people to listen to the 30 second previews on iTunes. This, and many other claims, are being rejected even by the copyright friendly courts, as the ASCAP found out this week. The content owners, and the people who have been profiting from royalties, are doing everything they can to hold on, even asking Congress to make it a law so that they never lose their cash cow. Instead of embracing change, they’re fighting it, and you wonder how long they can go on doing the same thing. The longer that legitimate and comparable alternatives to illegal downloads are not implemented, the more likely that illegal downloads will be accepted as acceptable practice by the general public.

And many things that have been adopted as common practice, such as recording TV shows to your VCR/DVR or ripping your CDs to MP3, are now considered legal. But they won’t be legal if the Canadian group Access Copyright have anything to do with it, and they propose that any of these acts should carry a fee that goes toward the content owners, or at least the people who profit from giving out licenses, such as Access Copyright. It seems that the copyright debate has gone all the way back to pre Universal vs Betamax times, and the content owners are still trying to fight innovation, even if that particular innovation (the ability to record stuff) is a couple of decades old already.

Nobody likes the MPAA, not even the studios that it represents

This anti innovation drive has a lot of people angry, and has given agencies such as the MPAA quite a bit of bad PR. So what do they do about it? Instead of calling it “anti-piracy”, anti-piracy is now called “content protection“. Protecting the content from those pesky and annoying people called customers, perhaps, and also protecting profits again innovation. The studios are also unhappy at the MPAA’s approach, calling it not aggressive enough. The shift in strategy will mean that the MPAA will now go after ISPs and network operators, to clamp down on the spread of information from a higher level. Yes, this should make them more popular. And this brings us quite nicely into the iiNet trial, the landmark “studio versus ISP” case that could determine the future of the Internet. It’s the second week of the trial, and you can read the summary in the linked post. Suffice to say, if ISPs are to become copyright cops with the power to kick people off the Internet, then you have to wonder, due to the ever increasing importance of the Internet to people’s way of life (and work), whether this infringes on people’s rights in a democratic society. Finland has just made 1 Mb broadband a basic legal right for anyone who lives in the country, and they will up the speed to 100 Mb by 2015. This seems to be the direction many countries are going towards, making Internet a basic utility just like power or water. But if the Internet is a basic utility, then how does the three-strikes system (or as in the iiNet case the “one-strike” system) affect this basic legal right. Can you be denied water or electricity because you’re a suspected criminal? Can the government deny anyone the ability to make a phone call, and even so, is it something they can enforce at all unless that person is in prison, or under house arrest. And in the end, will any of this actually protect the profits of billion dollar movie and music studios, or will kicking people off this brand new global distribution platform actually hurt profits in the long term. And why is the government doing anything to protect profits of private companies anyway, especially at the tax payer’s expense?

But let’s end this section on a slightly happier, and sane, note. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later says that perhaps the best way to fight piracy is to cut movie prices, because the cinema still has something unique to offer in terms of the viewing experience, compared to a poor quality screener. It’s a crazy suggestion, so it might just work. Or we can just ban the cinema, so nobody can bring a camera into the cinema and record it. Problem solved!

In high definition news, the CEO of Netflix says that DVDs may be on the way out. But instead of Blu-ray replacing the format, it will actually be streaming. Of course, he’s referring to movie rental, not sale-through, and his director of corporate communications had to soften the statement by saying that growth is positive on all the formats.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings based his opinions on the fact that more and more people are opting for the cheapest DVD rental plan, while still keeping the most fully featured streaming option. I think the convenience of streaming, instant access, no need to wait for the disc in the mail and post it back, might be the reason for this shift. But until HD streaming becomes an affordable reality for everyone, which means bandwidth speed and allowance will have to increase, Blu-ray is still the only show in town if you want the best quality HD movies.

TDK's 100 GB Blu-ray Disc: May not work on current Blu-ray players

What may be not so good for Blu-ray, or actually Blu-ray owners, is the news that 50+ GB discs may not be compatible with current players. So if the movie studios ever decide to use 100 GB discs, say for TV series box sets, then Blu-ray owners will have to upgrade their Blu-ray players again. And I say again because many have already had to upgrade their profile 1.0 players to 1.1 or 2.0, to access features like PiP and Internet content. Chances are, this won’t ever happen, because it will just hurt the format too much if people are yet again forced to adopt new hardware with new disc drives, which further highlights just how out of date the idea of using discs is in the age of digital distribution. And I don’t think people mind having a bunch of discs in a box set, as I think it actually makes it look like more value.

China Blue HD, which is HD DVD for China, is being imported into Europe, along with cheap movies. Can’t see the studios being happy about it, since they licensed movies to CBHD for sale in China only, and the cheap player that comes with a dozen free movies may confuse buyers when they’re out there shopping for Blu-ray.

And for Trekkies or Trekkers, and those who don’t mind a bit of DRM, then this might be for you: A Starfleet badge shaped USB thumb drive with a copy of the latest Star Trek movie on it? How can one resist!

Not much going on in gaming, as everyone is waiting for the delayed NPD stats (due on Thursday, but has been delayed until Monday). It is expected that the Sony PS3 will jump to first place, from third, for the first time since its launch in 2006. Most expect the Wii to be second, with the Xbox 360 third. Microsoft has already came out with a pre-emptive attack on the numbers, calling it a temporary bump and saying that the 360 will still be the number one selling console for 2009.

2010 is looking like a decisive year for this generation. Sony has it’s Wii like motion system, but Natal may trump it as the must have casual gaming gadget. Nintendo has been quiet, which makes me suspect they’ve got something up their sleeves.

The NPD analysis for September 2009 should be posted sometime during the week, so until the next edition of the WNR, I hope you’ve had a good time reading this, have a good week and don’t forget to tip the waiter.