In most areas of entertainment, DRM is an option. If you want to publish an ebook, you don't have to use DRM. Same for video games and music. While these others areas of entertainment are moving away from DRM, there is one prominent holdout on the DRM front: movies. Every official distribution and streaming service for the movie industry has some form of required DRM. This includes streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, download services like Amazon and iTunes, and even the physical media such as DVD and Blu-ray. According to the larger studios, DRM is a necessity, even though its effectiveness is questionable at best and customers hate it. But what about those studios that want to deliver a High Definition experience without the burden of DRM? What choices do they have? If all they want to do is allow people to stream or download the movie, they have plenty of options, but what if they want to include the full feature list available via Blu-ray?

This is one quandary that Terry Hancock of Free Software Magazine found himself facing a little over a year ago. He had been working on two films and wanted a High Definition feature rich experience without the hassle of Blu-ray DRM. He had looked at multiple options, many of which fell a little flat in the end. However, one stood out as the most reasonable option for what he wanted to do. He had to write his own open, DRM-free, HD video standard.

Thanks to Nina Paley, we learn that Terry has started a Kickstarter Campaign to help fund the creation of this open HD video standard called, Lib-ray. Terry describes the motivation behind this campaign as follows:

This may sound like a quixotic goal for a lone individual without corporate backing to develop, but most of the money spent on developing Blu-Ray was spent on the DRM technology -- meaning the technology to make it not play under certain circumstances. The actual business of getting menus and video to work is much simpler, and a lot of the work has already been done. So a format without DRM, based on open standards is intrinsically more attainable.

Think about that. Designing DRM is designing ways in which your movie will not play. Why would anyone want to waste time and money on such an idiotic goal? You would think that movie producers would want people to watch their movies. This idea is what pushed Terry to this point. Why waste time and money on using a DRM'ed media like Blu-ray to release what he wants to be a free culture movie? Even if he tried to work around the DRM of Blu-ray, there is no guarantee that the movies would play in standard Blu-ray players and he would still have to deal with licensing issues.

Terry has not set himself up for disappointment with this standard. He recognizes that it will not unseat Blu-ray as the mass market standard but rather is looking at this for use as a promotional format for those who want to distribute physical media. His examples include using the standard for films as Kickstarter rewards or to distribute films at conventions. There are a lot of opportunities for this to be successful in the indie scene.

On top of this, Terry plans to make the standard completely open and open source. While he does not have an open source web destination yet, he plans to have one ready soon. This choice is probably the key to gaining a more wide spread adoption. If he had tried to keep it locked up in the same way as Blu-ray or DVD, it would never take off.

I applaud the effort Terry is putting into this project. However, it is frustrating that such a project needs to exist. The insistence of the movie studios that all distribution of their films be burdened with DRM is not only ineffective, but it is also harming indie artists who would love to access the features without the restrictions and massive licensing fees. Hopefully, this project will succeed and give those artists the control (or lack of control) they want over their work.

AdamR writes in to let us know that owners of Samsung Blu-ray players have been discovering that the latest firmware update means that movies from Warner Bros. and Universal don't play. Instead, they just lock up thanks to the DRM built into Blu-ray. Isn't that great? Pissing off legitimate customers is always a way to win people over. Of course, you have to wonder if Warner Bros. and Universal are upset with Samsung, but really they should only be upset with themselves for supporting a DRM technique that could block legitimate customers from watching their movies.

One of the major reasons why Blu-ray is still struggling to catch on (despite winning the long drawn out victory over competing format HD-DVD) is that you're extremely limited in what you can do with Blu-ray content. In an era when people are used to being able to move content and time- and place-shift it at will, Blu-ray is quite limiting. This has become a growing concern to those in Hollywood who thought Blu-ray was going to be its savior. Unfortunately, the response is being equally bungled by Hollywood. The key concept is the idea of "managed copies," which (in theory) will let users make limited DRM'd copies for time- and place-shifting.

Of course, that assumes that the offering actually works. And right now it's nearly impossible to tell. Jerry Leichter alerts us to a story of one small studio that's trying to implement "managed copy" offerings and is finding it to be nearly impossible. The instructions on how to do it are not at all clear, and the studio is not getting much in the way of help from those behind the standard. Furthermore, there's simply no way to test to see if they're doing it right, since there's no equipment that can handle managed copies yet. And this is from a studio, Scenic Labs, that believes DRM is pointless and "piracy is going to happen." So why is it even bothering? It basically has no choice. If you're creating commercial Blu-ray discs, this is the only option you get: it must include this poorly documented DRM if you want to offer a copyable version.

Of course, there is one alternative. As the head of the studio notes, if they screwed up the process, they have no interest in remastering the discs, so they'll just ask buyers to send a cameraphone photo of the purchased DVD, and they'll send them a digital file over the internet.

Way back in 2005, as we sat through yet another ridiculous and self-defeating standards battle over the "next generation" standard for high definition DVDs, we pointed out that it was probably already too late, as the market was already beginning to recognize that disc-based storage made less and less sense. And yet, because the two sides fighting over the standard could only see monopolistic dollar signs from winning the "battle" they kept on fighting. Yet, with two competing standards, very few people wanted to bet on either one, knowing if they bet wrong, they were stuck with a useless box. And this went on for years. And years. And eventually Blu-ray won in early 2008, even though it was clearly already too late.

The latest numbers suggest, indeed, that despite Blu-ray "winning" the standards battle, it likely missed the big window for success, as many people just don't see the point in buying yet another new box and having to get movies all over again -- especially as online delivery is becoming more and more effective and efficient. I don't think Blu-ray will collapse completely, but it seems like the standards battle became a prisoner's dilemma of sorts -- with both sides ending up much worse off. If they had just agreed to a standard back in 2004/2005, when they had a chance, because online delivery options really weren't that good. Today, however, they're not just good enough for many people, they're getting better all the time.

"Beginning next year, studios and other content holders will be required to give consumers the ability to make one copy of any Blu-ray Disc they buy," says the article (via Engadget). Sounds great -- movie studios and others finally realizing that people should be able to freely back up DVDs they legitimately purchase. The devil, of course, is in the details. While discs will have to support this "managed copy" feature, it will require new hardware, and there's no mandate that DVD player manufacturers include support for it at all. The copy, as you'd expect, is all DRM'ed up, and in order to make the copy, the Blu-ray player will have to connect to an "authorization server". This is the sort of model that's caused lots of problems in the past, when companies decide to pull the plug on the servers, rendering the feature useless. But the biggest potential problem with the feature is that movie studios and others will be free to charge whatever they wish for it. That means this really isn't a backup or a copy at all, it's simply the distribution means for the latest incarnation of the entertainment industry's favorite business model: getting people to pay for the same content over and over. That's why the studios want to block things like Real DVD -- not because they'll increase piracy, but because they cut off the only business model the studios can see for digital content.

An industry analyst says that Blu-ray disc sales could help save the home-video business, which is hurting as sales of traditional DVDs drop off. This seems to be at odds with earlier stories, which said that Blu-ray sales were particularly bleak, and weren't prompting consumers to upgrade their libraries of standard DVDs. Blu-ray continually gets portrayed as some sort of quantum leap in DVD technology, but in reality, it doesn't look like it offers enough advantages over standard DVDs to tempt large numbers of consumers to buy in at its higher price. Innovative online services -- if the movie studios will allow them to emerge -- would seem to offer the industry a better chance at salvation, rather than yet another form of locked-down plastic disc at a higher price.

DVDs are Hollywood studios' most significant moneymaker these days, but sales are falling: one service says they're off 9 percent overall this year, while sales of higher-priced new releases are down 22 percent. With the way the economy is going, a spending slowdown isn't all that surprising, though entertainment revenues have historically held up quite well in down times. But studios are facing a scarier fact: perhaps consumers are losing interest in buying DVDs. One particularly bleak spot is the sales of Blu-ray, which was intended to spur consumers to buy expensive DVD players to match their new HDTVs, then replace their libraries with expensive new Blu-ray discs so they could get better picture quality than from standard DVDs. But sales of players have been slow, and sales of the discs haven't been much better.

The original article spends a lot of time talking about price, but never goes so far as to say that it's starting to look like consumers have no willingness to pay a premium over regular DVDs for Blu-ray's supposed benefits. For many people, the difference in picture quality simply isn't enough to justify buying a new DVD player -- no matter how cheap -- and buying more expensive discs, particularly as money gets tighter. James Surowiecki at the New Yorker has a good post on this angle, saying the vast difference in picture quality between VHS and DVD helped drive sales of the latter, but the difference between DVD and Blu-ray isn't wide enough to have a similar effect. But the studios say the down economy will give Blu-ray a boost, because "the supply of Blu-ray players is likely to sharply exceed demand in the coming holiday season, pushing down prices." That seems like a nice way to spin low sales expectations, but even if you ignore that, Blu-ray prices have a long way to fall before they're anywhere near competitive with upconverting standard DVD players.

Blu-ray "won" the next-generation DVD standards battle, but that victory has, thus far, been pretty hollow, as consumers haven't wholeheartedly embraced the new format (and the new DVD players they need to take advantage of it). But one group of people is loving Blu-ray: Asian movie pirates. The pirates rip Blu-ray movies, then burn them onto DVDs using the AVCHD format, at a resolution that's lower than Blu-ray, but still higher than standard DVDs. The lower resolution means the pirates can burn onto regular blank DVDs, not blank Blu-ray discs, holding their costs down and creating fat profit margins on the $7 bootlegs. Wasn't one of the reasons the movie industry was so hot on Blu-ray its fantastic DRM that was supposed to make life hell for pirates? All it appears to have really done is annoy customers, while Blu-ray itself is making the pirates' business even better.

A bunch of regular readers of Techdirt have been sending in Robin Harris' analysis that, despite beating HD-DVD in a drawn out standards battle, Blu-ray DVDs don't seem to be gaining much traction. Harris specifically states: "16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?" I guess Harris doesn't read Techdirt. Because we predicted such an outcome 3 years ago when the standards battle delayed adoption, and again when Blu-ray launched over two years ago, and again when HD-DVD dropped out earlier this year. It wasn't exactly rocket science to recognize what would happen, if you just compared the standards battle over DVDs to previous standards battles, and looked at the competitive environment and tech horizon, you could see that an extended standards battle would hurt both sides. That said, I'm actually not as pessimistic as Harris about Blu-ray's chances. I think that it will catch on somewhat and become more widely used -- though, not nearly as widely as if the standard had been set three years ago, before online delivery of movies was a viable option.