There’s a next generation of DVD that’s coming out. Actually there are two competing technologies: Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Both of these seek to do for the DVD what high definition broadcasts have done for regular TV – dramatically increase the resolution of video, thereby producing far sharper pictures. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this – aside from what should only be another technology battle along the lines of VHS and Betamax. In practice, however, Hollywood has stuck their noses into the mix and screwed it all up.

For many years now, Hollywood (or, more specifically, the MPAA) has been aghast at what they believe to be a huge impact on their profit margin: people who pirate DVDs. As such, they’ve managed to convince technology companies that no high definition DVD can be allowed to function unless it has certain copy protection built into it. The term for this particular system is “HDCP” (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection). This is okay in principle, but they’ve taken it to truly Draconion measures. While things have not exactly shaken out in their entirety, I’ve heard things like you’ll only be able to play a next generation DVD on the player you orignally put it in, your player will send data back to some information centre, letting people know who’s playing it, and it will be impossible to make a backup copy of media. All of these are things designed to prevent piracy. But they also serve to dramatically hinder the privacy and fair use of people who are the legitimate owners of media. The worst part is that there’s really no objective research that’s been done to show that Hollywood’s belief that they’re losing money hand over fist to movie piracy is actually a defensible position. There aren’t any hard figures – and those that are given have only been “spun” a certain way by the executives, while a contrary conclusion could also be drawn. (This is all similar to the music industry going crazy over the “huge” numbers of sales that MP3 downloads have cost them when, in reality, there’s no clear cut evidence of that either. In fact, some studies have shown that users who download music are more likely to buy after having sampled.)

In addition to the things that might be done to prevent actual copying, those same measures are also going to have a major impact on the ability to even view a movie that’s been recorded onto one of these new DVDs. Assuming you’ve spent the money on a TV system that can support this – you’re simply out of luck when it comes to viewing it on your computer. There is, currently, no available computer monitor or video card (and you need both) that will let you view such a movie. Or, if you can view it, view it in its proper resolutions. (You may only be able to get a slightly-better-than-current-DVD quality picture out of it, even if you can play it in the first place.) In all likelihood – you could pop the movie into a next generation DVD drive (that you’ve just bought), push play – and have your monitor simply go black – as this article discusses.

So, to say I’m unhappy with Hollywood studio executives here would be an understatement. As far as I’m concerned, this is an exciting technology that I could easily see myself buying into – if it hadn’t been so completely hobbled by fearful panic button pushers who have too much influence over these things. In the current state of affairs, I can clearly state that I’ll be boycotting both new technologies – and hoping that they both fail utterly. I don’t want to see either fail for their own sake, but this is the only way I can see that the these people can get the message. Hopefully, they’ll spend lots of money on producing new versions of their movies, only to find that there is no market because they’ve stifled their audience. In the end, with any luck, they’ll realize their mistake and “fix things” so that we get the technology without the ridiculous limitations that are going to go along with it at first.