Media Giants Join Forces In Content Consortium

A big consortium of Movie, hardware, and digital companies have joined forces to form the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. The DECE has at its heart the goal of making digital media like music and movies a "buy once, play anywhere" experience. The concept will allow consumers to buy digital media and be able to play it on any DECE compatible device anywhere they like — even when the content isn't with them they should be able access their content from a cloud-based media locker. Expect a major announcement which will cover standards and technology info at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2009. The consortium currently includes Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Fox, HP, Intel, Lions Gate, Microsoft, NBC Universal,Paramount, Philips, Sony, Toshiba, Verisign, and Warner Brothers. The group's president and primary architect is Mitch Singer, who is also currently chief technology officer at Sony Pictures. Apple are notably absent from the consortium, but dont expect any appearance real soon unless they, as a company, change their stance on DRM. For more info, read this article at digitaltrends.

Pirates & Game Producer Exchange Ideas

Cliff Harris, an independent game developer with Positech Games decide to open up a dialogue with game pirates to figure out just why people actually pirate games. It seems that there was quite a deluge of mail and Cliff seems to have paid attention. The main areas of contention appear to be - Games are too expensive. The quality of games is all over the place. DRM hurts legitimate customers. Positech responded by dropping DRM and lowering prices ... it'll be interesting to see how the pirates respond and if sales actually go up ... Read his summary of the feedback here.

Yahoos DRM Legacy...

Yahoo are closing its Yahoo! Music Store for good. They are also taking their DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Problem is, that by doing so, they will be rendering any of the DRM based music bought through their store obsolete. Chalk one up for the protectionists in this one, congrats you just screwed a whole bunch of people out of their legally acquired music.

HD-DVD Retired

Toshiba finally pulled the plug on the future of HD-DVD. Toshiba stated that they "carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," ... "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality." Toshiba plan to slow down shipments of HD-DVD players with the intention of stopping them altogether by the end of March. So Blu-ray has won, but the battle may not be over yet. I for one would like to see Blu-ray succeed, even in light of increasing competition from digital downloads. For me the beauty of owning a disk is the additional content that comes along with it. Digital downloads need to offer that capability and the immediacy of playback without any kind of wait.

Music, Media & Money

I'm both fascinated and annoyed at many of the approaches the music companies are taking at making money. They bitch and complain about piracy and to be honest they are probably right to certain degree. However, I've been buying music for a long time, and much of my music until about 10 years ago was on vinyl. Every time a new device or media technology is announced, I cringe and think "does this mean I'm going to have to buy all the music in my library again". I've previously bought music on LP's, Tapes, CD's, DVD's and even the odd piece of digital music online and on memory card. I love gadgets like many others, however I can tell you this, I won't be jumping to, or spending a lot of money on new mediums. I'll continue buying CD's and then ripping them to my media players. I'm happy enough with that. Stop re-inventing the wheel ... Frankly I'm sick of spending my hard earned money to make some fat cat music executive or lawyer rich. If you want me to buy music I already have, you've got to offer me a lot more than a new package or a "remastered" version. Invest some money in value added content and pay the artists more ... you media moguls can certainly afford it. In case you're wonder why I'm so pissed I sat down recently and figured out how much it would cost me to replace my record collection at £15 a CD ... I freaked. Think about this a moment ... the record companies sue the hell out of copyright violators and yet when it come to paying the creators of that same music, they drag their heels and cry saying the music business is expensive. Yet the RIAA and other organisations with similar interest have been trying to change the law as regards to royalties so that they dont have to keep paying the creators of the music they're selling. Read this article over at IGN for more, it details that the RIAA recently petitioned Judges to lower the royalties so that the record companies can make more money... For another take on why the MPAA thinks piracy exists read another article again at IGN, it made sense to me.