Heat wave on burning

By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 7/28/2006

JULY 28 | Perhaps it was the heat in Los Angeles last week and the threat of power outages that focused people’s thinking.

Or perhaps it was the growing threat of yet another format war.

Whatever the reason, common sense managed to prevail at the inter-industry meetings held there July 25 and 26 to discuss adopting a standardized digital rights management scheme for download-and-burn services.

Negotiators from the consumer electronics industry, technology companies and the studios agreed to adopt CSS as the main copy-protection system for custom-burned discs, according to sources familiar with the proceedings, without imposing any additional security requirements on new DVD drives or players.

The agreement breaks a long impasse between studios and hardware and technology companies and opens the way to ensuring that discs burned from downloaded movies will be uniformly compatible with set-top DVD players.

CSS is the copy-protection system on commercially manufactured DVDs, and all standard DVD drives and players are equipped to read CSS-encrypted discs.

Though other copy-protection systems are available, such as FluxDVD used on CinemaNow’s download-and-burn service, those discs sometimes have playability problems on standard DVD drives.

The problem is made worse by the multiplicity of recordable DVD formats on the market.

Standard DVD players are designed around the DVD-ROM format, as defined by the DVD Forum. Some of the recordable formats in use today, however, were developed outside the normal DVD Forum procedures and are not always completely interchangeable with other recordable discs or DVD-ROM players.

That has been a particular concern of the hardware makers involved in the discussions, according to sources familiar with their thinking. Player manufacturers fear that consumers will blame incompatibility problems on their players, rather than on the discs, creating potential liability for the hardware companies.

To ameliorate those concerns, last week’s agreement includes development of a new type of recordable disc to be used for download-and-burn applications that is closer in its structure to ROM discs.

But last week’s agreement also represents a significant concession by the studios.

For months, the studios had insisted that any deal to adopt CSS for download-and-burn also include new security measures that would be implemented on any device capable of burning downloaded files.

Among those new measures was an enhanced form of CSS authentication and the ability to detect watermarks inserted into theatrical film prints to prevent playback of discs made from illegally camcorded copies.

By agreeing to a deal that does not include the enhanced security measures, the studios officially abandoned their long-cherished dream of “fixing” CSS, which has long-since been compromised and is easily circumvented.

THAT THE STUDIOS would abandon their dream is a measure of their growing sense of urgency in moving to a download-and-burn model.

Even had they been able to persuade hardware makers to accept the enhanced security features, implementing those measures would have added months to the negotiations before a final agreement was reached.

The precise method of enhanced CSS authentication was not spelled out in any of the studios’ proposals, according to sources familiar with them; evaluating available options and agreement on a final method would require months of work and negotiations.

Ditto for selecting a watermark, with the added possibility that the losing vendors might sue for antitrust violations, as happened with previous efforts to incorporate watermark detection into the DVD format.

As the CinemaNow deal made clear, however, at least some studios had had a change of heart on the enhanced security measures if they meant further delay in moving to a download-and-burn model.

As it is, commercial deployments of download-and-burn services based on last week’s deal are still months away, according to those involved.

Although work is already underway on the new discs, they are yet to be approved by the DVD Forum. (I erroneously reported last week that approval had already been granted.)

The agreement actually calls for two different flavors of new disc: one optimized for enterprise solutions, such as in-store kiosks or custom replication operations, and one optimized for home use.

Hardware makers whose recordable devices are built around non-Forum-developed disc formats may also need to tweak their designs to work with the new discs.

The agreement itself must also be approved by the DVD Copy Control Assn., a process with many steps that depends on no one raising serious objections.

The best case scenario is that the pieces will come together sometime around the beginning of the year, allowing the new services to launch in early 2007.

There, that didn’t hurt, did it?

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