Rant, Part 1 of 3: Format Wars

With more time on my hands than I know what to do with here I've had time to reflect on any number of random things. The first two pieces are technical in nature, the third is not. So get comfy and settle in for some good ol' ramblings from yours truly.

Lately there has been a big stink over the next format to succeed DVD. I could care less about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Neither has me excited in the least. Hollywood has their head so far up the asses of the committees responsible for fleshing out these two new standards that all we’re going to end up with is a format that will roughly triple or more the capacity of DVD and be riddled with some form of DRM. Hollywood is still in denial that people are realizing that they can have content when and how they want it and the studios are having a hard time wrapping their money-lusting minds around that.

They should concentrate their efforts on a digital delivery system for movies and music. And that might mean they need to start cutting away at the traditional corporate infrastructure that has been built up over the years. All that money used to manufacture discs and boxes could be saved, not to mention the positive environmental impact that might have.

Sure, there should be some form of content protection on the new format for software but quit trying to muddle with it because you want people to only be able to watch movies they bought at home or some other nonsense. With the direction we’re heading in we’re only going to end up with some evolutionary piece of junk that holds more data and will take longer for some guru out there to crack the protection so we can all start copying again.

I’m excited about what the format after this next one will hold. Already there are holographic technologies out there that could hold anywhere from 100-1,000 GB. Right now it would be theoretically way too expensive, $3,000+, for consumers and it’s still in development but by the end of the lifecycle of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray it should be ripe for the picking.