Panasonic, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony, and Toshiba are developing a digital rights system (DRM) for SD cards that would allow consumers to transfer HD content from a device like DVR to an SD card to watch on their smartphone or tablet – but not to be able to share that content with a friend. Boo.
The technology firms are creating this DRM in order to satisfy the continually short-sighted demands of the entertainment industry, who believe that person to person sharing will destroy their business model. Home taping will kill th record industry? VHS will kill movies? Bollocks. Both of those technologies gave huge boosts to sales and came with no DRM. A major reason people pirate content today is to avoid the DRM so they can play the content on the device of their choosing – more DRM which will likely not be interoperable with older technologies will not help matters.
It seems amazing that even when watching the record industry make the same mistakes five years ago in pushing DRM on their paying customers – giving them a worse deal with the content they’d paid for when compared to their “pirate” friends – the movie and television industries are intent on following the same course of action. Have they stopped to think why Netflix is so successful in getting people to pay for their content? It is because Netflix is device agnostic as they develop the software to run on as many platforms as possible – giving the user the option on how they consume the content. Lock it up and people look elsewhere.
Most DVD players these days will play XViD/DivX content (and many increasingly now offering MKV/MP4 playpack), but none will play this content when it’s locked with DRM. Just because content is HD does not mean people want to be locked to a device any more than they were previously – and people won’t be. Until legal content is offered with the same freedoms and device-neutral portability that pirated content has, the film industry will continue to see sales slide. People are prepared to pay for content, but not full price for each device, not for content locked to one operating system, or playback in one country. If you want people to pay at all, you have to first stop trying to make people pay for the same content multiple times or piracy will step in and people will not pay at all.
[photo courtesy of ChelseaGirl]