HomeWeekly News Roundup (29 June 2008)
Welcome back to another edition of WNR. Not a hugely busy week in terms of news, but still some interesting bits and pieces to chew on. Let’s not waste any time and get to it.
Starting with copyright news, in the war against torrents, torrent site The Pirate Bay are upping security measures by introducing encryption. This is mainly due to new laws in Sweden which came into effect last week that allows the government to spy on private communications, including Internet traffic. It was always a matter of time before technology makes torrent downloading impossible to track and stop. 
The whole idea of torrents itself was to de-centralize file sharing so it cannot be stopped, and encrypted communications channels and privacy filters is just the next natural step. But the war goes on for now and in the courts, the MPAA has scored another victory, this time against torrent site EliteTorrents.
DRM is still refusing to die, but progress is being made to make it a bit fairer. Microsoft is the latest to come out with a new piece of software for Xbox 360 owners that allows DRM’d content to be moved to another 360 box, which was previously not possible before.
Onto HD news now, here in Australia, Blu-ray is in a good position as the PS3 is the leading console here, not the Xbox 360 as in Europe or the US/Canada. Of course, Blu-ray prices are still high, for both hardware and software, and not just high compared to DVDs, but high compared to Blu-ray pricing elsewhere in the world. A local newspaper here has written a piece that urges users to wait before investing in a new Blu-ray player, as better and cheaper stuff will be coming soon. It does make sense, because Profile 2.0 players will soon become the norm, which will drive down prices of Profile 1.1. players, and it’s only a matter of time before Chinese manufacturers get in on the act. In the meantime, it might be worth studying just what else you will need to upgrade to Blu-ray. You can of course read my Blu-ray (and HD DVD) Buyer’s Guide, but Dolby has released their own guide which, obviously, concentrates on their new high bitrate audio formats designed for Blu-ray. 
The audio aspect of Blu-ray is something that will confuse quite a few people, with nearly a dozen new audio formats and output combinations to contend with. The short answer is to get an AV receiver that supports HDMI audio input, and that will almost always give you support for all the new audio formats, in combination with a proper Blu-ray player that can decode everything to PCM first.
There’s a bit more movement on the PC front too, which to be honest, hasn’t seen the mass acceptance that DVDs received at this stage, despite prices being lower. PowerDVD is now certified for BD-Live (Profile 2.0) and AVCREC (HD on DVD, using MPEG-4 AVC).
But Blu-ray has to hurry before other distribution methods start eating into its market share. There’s a whole bunch of news about new download services, even including one from Sony, so there’s an obvious trend towards that kind of distribution. Sony has struck a deal with DivX to provide movie downloads for Sony products (PS3, PSP, most likely). It will be DRM’d, but the DRM is user based, not device based, so movie files can be moved from place to place without problem. 
The PS3 will get the movie download service soon in the US, and then later on in Europe and Japan. So if even Sony is investing heavily into downloads, you can see why other analysts might question the future viability of Blu-ray. Netflix recently launched their own download service, requiring a hardware box from Roku. But Xbox 360 owners can now get around this hardware requirement through a Media Center plugin, and get access to Netflix’s services. Official support for Netflix services might be on the way too.
And in gaming news, Sony has revealed figures showing that the PS3 has cost them $3.32 Billion so far. That figure is still growing though, as every PS3 sold still loses money for Sony. Even Microsoft, who launched the 360 a full year before the PS3, has only just started making a profit, despite having superior software sales which is the real money earner in the industry. The PS3 will get a new graphics chip soon, which might help reduce costs a bit. And there is news of the upcoming 2.40 firmware, which promises to be a big one that finally adds in game XMB and a bunch of other features that Xbox 360 users have taken for granted.
The Xbox 360 might get a price drop soon, to take it below $USD 300. That should help recent flagging sales. On the other end of the scale, you can now buy a custom made Xbox 360, that also plays Wii games and acts like an iPod, for as little as $25,000. Hope this one doesn’t RRoD after 3 month!
I think that’s all for this week. I’ll be back next week with more WNR, unless posting news is outlawed by the MPAA before then. See you then.