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Leaked Sony email reveals that Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros and Disney plan to unite in a campaign against Google to fight online piracy: “If successful, the result would fundamentally alter the open nature of the internet.”(r/technology)
Your entire post is just a whole load of corporate fear mongering with a lot of exaggeration, oversimplification, and misinformation
>This is why they should have never given the HD disc market “Blu-Ray” to Sony
They didn’t do anything, Sony doesn’t own blu-ray and it never did. Blu-Ray is owned by a consortium that was started by several companies including Sony. At the end of the day we chose which one won through our collective purchasing decisions.
> Sony, a motion picture company
Sony isn’t a motion picture company. Sony corp owns a motion picture company called Sony Pictures Entertainment (previously Columbia Pictures Entertainment) that it purchased from Coca-Cola corpin the 1989. Sony has a lot of varied business interests with almost dozen subsidiaries all as big as SPE. Why do you think the interests of SPE overpower SCE who makes Playstation, SMC who makes cell phones. SME who sells music, and not to mention their quiet Holding corp and private bank Sony Financial Holdings , that is more profitable than any of their other subsidiaries. In the context of this ecosystem, the demands of studio executives are laughably irrelevant to the tech company. Hell, if you take a look at a corporate/investor/FY report from sony corp, all they talk about is their tech, devices, playstations, and how White House Down did way worse than expected and almost took SPE into a loss, they do not care about SPE besides profitability. You can bet your ass Sony will divest of SPE if it becomes consistently unprofitable
>Notice how Blu-Ray’s still have region coding?, in 2014, for no reason really —> When all HD-DVD’s were region free from the start, all of them!
And? Notice who the large customers are? Companies selling movies and other media. They wanted region encoding to control releases and import. HD DVD didn’t deliver. No customers in industry means no disks on the shelves, means no consumer adoption. HD-DVD was not competitive with this regards. Not that I think thats great, but if you are trying to make a product successful no matter how good it is, alienating your major customers isn’t the best idea especially since its a non-issue for the majority of private consumers.
>Toshiba also had the DVD logo rights, they were going to make DUAL DISC (HD-DVD and DVD) back in 2007 to get people to transfer over from DVD in masses, what did Blu-Ray do? Not introduce this until 2013 for the most part. Again, only looking out for selling various SKU’s of the same movie on DVD instead of advancing the technology to get everyone to switch over right away to the HD disc market.
This makes no sense. Hybrid disks are just as useless for advancing the HD disk market as the combo dvd/BD boxes that BDs have been packaged with for years, because it does nothing to encourage people to upgrade. At the end of the day its a gimmick transition technology.
>I was preaching this in the early days of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war,
This statement shows your immense emotional bias. It was never a war, and why the hell are you preaching FFS.
>In addition, Sony has never lowered their licensing fees to simply allow a company to use the Blu-Ray logo so that more electronic companies can make Blu-Ray products or playback decks to advance the technology.
Again, Sony does not set BD licensing fees or own the logos and other trademarks. The BD consortium does. Sony doesn’t even own the majority of the patents related to BD. This is a piss-easy thing to look up, the fact that you didnt bother to do so is mind boggling.
>Once Sony won, Sony crippled the advancement of the technology. Have you heard of anything great Blu-Ray has done to the technology and their Blu-Ray decks?
Crippled is a bit strong. The home player/media market has been dying for a while, the lack of significant investment in this area is more to do with economics than anything else. For example, Sony home entertainment has been barely scraping by, usually operating at a loss. On the other hand, as archival media, BD consortium has made significant progress since the fall of HD-DVD. 100+GB BD-R disks, compatability formats for writing BD format onto physical DVD disks, consistent updates to standards at a rate typical of most large standards consortium, 4K movies is now standard approved and have already begun shipping , I will only mention 3D in passing because I don’t consider that progress 😉 . Sony Corp of all the consortium members is the most desperate to see the format succeed, just because it won against HD-DVD doesn’t mean that the fight is over and Sony knows this. Sony Pictures in this context is basically irrelevant from a command and control perspective, they are essentially just another customer.
>The encryption on Blu-Ray is harder than DVD. In the end, it’s just greed by the studios who put their content/product in front of the advancement of the Blu-Ray / HD disc technology. They have slowed/crippled the HD disc market and technology annually because they are in control, from A to Z.
Yes, and the encryption on DVD is stronger than the ad hoc vendor DRM technologies of VCD’s, which itself was stronger than analog copy protection used on VHS. Who gives a crap? It was broken anyway, and its not like proprietary DRM is forced on my archival content, only on stamped BD’s to prevent the unmotivated from copying movies. For what its worth Toshiba and Sony both are founders of AACS. So they are both firmly invested in DRM and copy protection
>Wonder why? Sony makes it expensive to license/produce blank Blu-Ray discs and drives, and that’s just a small part of it.
Yeah, Blu-Ray Association charges a licensing fee, but so does almost every other standards consortium out there. Want to develop ISO or IEEE? pay them a few $k for specs. Want to use MP3? You Still have to pay a few bucks per device and a minimum of $15,000 a year in licensing fees. With the exception of the V3 (3D BD) specs Blu-Ray ASC charges the same amount for licensing their trademarks and tech specsheet for hardware manufacturers as the DVD Forum does! . I even looked up the HD-DVD licensing details on the internet archive,it was just as expensive to license HD-DVD as BD for a hardware manufacturer . You can purchase a BD-R drive for under $40 and individual disks for under $1 a disk. This is basically equivalent with what DVD-R had in 2004/2005, whoopdiedo.
>Notice Apple never put Blu-Ray players or drives in any of their machines after Sony Blu-Ray won. Then Steve Jobs famously said, “Blu-Ray is in a bag of hurt,” in 2008.
> Apple/Microsoft knew this and balked, sadly this killed the advancement of the HD disc market technology in the process for us, the consumer.
And yet, despite all your claims, Apple was the second company to join the BD consortium outside of the initial founders in 2005 (20Th century fox was the first), the fact that they didn’t include the drive says more about their internal product development cycle and philosophy than anything about control over media or licensing. Apple has no issues restricting control over playback on customers devices and if they were actually interested in the Tech BD would have been happy to have them on board, obviously they were turned off physical media for other reasons because its not like they offered HD DVD support in their super drives either. Microsoft’s balking had a lot more to do with BD shunning their platform for interactivity on bd players in favor of their rival Oracle’s Java. Ironically for you, a decision motivated by greed and not any objective standards complaint.
>So, this leak doesn’t surprise me one bit, the studios strong armed Toshiba and forced them out in order to control the HD disc market.
They didn’t force anyone out. As companies they chose the format that will be profitable for them. If HD-DVD’s were flying off the shelves, despite low copy protections you bet your ass the studios would be all over that. Hell early adopters like Warner were certainly sold by the low adoption cost for printing media, and they still couldn’t get people to buy them. After HD-DVD died they even tried to to sell a derivative HD-DVD standard exclusively for dirt cheap china market and failed again.
>Now Sony is trying their luck on the entire internet. Good luck with that Sony!
They aren’t trying their luck with anything. Sony Pictures Entertainment is wasting time and money trying to kill hydra. At the end of the day they are attempting to do their due diligence to protect their work, as any company on earth in that position will do. I don’t understand why something as obvious and natural as a company or individual working in its self interest is somehow shocking or evil. Just understand it, don’t buy their products if it bothers you and move the fuck on.