Yesterday we reported that the AACS Final Adopter Agreement had been made available and surprisingly still included in the license was the controversial Managed Copy which allows owners of Blu-ray movies to make themselves one legal digital copy to be played at home.
Today, Michael Ayers, chairman of the AACS Licensing Authority, has confirmed that all discs beginning in January 2010 will allow for one full 1080p resolution copy, which will be a Windows Media DRM video file which can then be burnt once to recordable BD or DVD discs.
Unfortunately, Ayers admits, most Blu-ray owners will not be able to make the copies immediately as current players will not have the ability to make the “managed copies.” Suppliers do not expect to get new players out with the ability to do so until the Q2 2010 at the earliest.
Additionally, the major studios have the ability to charge for the copy and will have full control over what kind of backups can be made.
According to VideoBusiness, “the way managed copy is expected to work is that a consumer would insert their disc in a Blu-ray player and the disc’s menu would include an option to make a managed copy or the consumer might have to press some buttons on their Blu-ray device to make a copy, Ayers said. Once they choose the option to make a copy, the Blu-ray player connects online to an authorization server, run by a studio, supplier or the AACS-LA. The authorization server then gives the go-ahead to make a copy.”
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The past year has been very eventful for Blu-ray. Many new Blu-ray products have been shown at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year, where just a year ago Blu-ray jumped ahead of its former rival dvd.cfm” target=”_blank”>HD DVD. “It turned out to be a phenomenal year for Blu-ray,” said Tom Adams of Adams Media Research. In the fourth quarter of 2008, which is only too important for tech companies, U.S. consumers bought up 28.6 million Blu-ray titles.
In the same period of 2007, U.S. consumers bought about 9.5 million titles. The biggest selling Blu-ray title, of course, was 2008’s box office heavyweight “The Dark Knight”, which was also the first Blu-ray title to sell over 1 million copies, according to the Blu-ray Disc Association.
BDA President, Andy Parsons, looks back at the beginning of the DVD-era to prove strength in Blu-ray, claiming a faster adoption rate than DVD, and CD. He counts 10.7 million Blu-ray players sold in the United States by the end of 2008, about two and half years since they first became available. By comparison, three years after DVD was launched, there were 5.4 million DVD players in consumers homes.
Critics of these statistics might point out that of the 10.7 million Blu-ray players counted, over 6 million are PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles, which arguably are sold moreso for gaming than Blu-ray. However, while this point could force player sales to become more evenly matched with early DVD player sales, rising Blu-ray disc sales may indicate growing interest in Blu-ray amongst PS3 owners who previously were not interested or aware of the Blu-ray functionality.
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Yesterday we reported unconfirmed reports that the RIAA had fired their “investigative arm”, MediaSentry.
Today the WSJ has confirmed that notion and says the trade group will replace MediaSentry with DtecNet Software ApS, a group it used before hiring MS.
MediaSentry was in charge of collecting evidence to be used against alleged pirates during a lawsuit brought on by the RIAA. Since 2002, over 35,000 lawsuits were brought against P2P users.
MediaSentry has been at the center of controversy for months now and has even been accused of investigating without a license, performing illegal searches and taps, and even destroying evidence.
