Frankly this isn't rocket science. The average consumer will take the box home. It won't work. And off they'll go to the store to hear "well to make it work you'll need one of these 1000-10,000 dollar TV's" and the consumer will say "here's your box back thank you but no thank you".
Frankly these folks are spending a lot of effort into something that often takes far less effort to break (meaning security). Typically you build a security code so that you can keep 50-75% of the people honest who might not otherwise be, a barrier that is not too hard to build and not impossible to breach, and you have a nice balance of cost vs return. These folks think they are building the Titanic. 30 days after it's released they're going to find their years of work goes the same direction the Titanic did.
They are not killing the market. But they will frustrate and turn away a lot of customers who encounter difficulties in what they expect to be able to do. Customers will expect these things to work as old VCR's did, watch a movie on a prerecorded item, record a show in HD and move the movies of some childs birthday to a high capacity video disc.
How will customers respond when they get messages like "you can't do this" or "sorry that show is not recordable"? Have a look at how people feel about the cable industry. People will look at their alternatives, probably standard DVD+RW at this point, and consider that they didn't have all these "problems" with that technology. They'll take the lower hit in quality for less issues. And those billions of R&D spent will be wasted until they go back and work to get it right.
These companies aren't stupid, despite how we technologists tend to think of them. But they do make mistakes. They are trying to judge how much "complication" the average consumer is willing to put up with. What I strongly believe they are misjudging in a generation that often has a hard time just figuring how to SET UP Hd, is that customers of today have an extremely low tolerance for anything that doesn't work simply and just like it's previous generation worked. People don't have time to muck with things or learn. It has to be simple. It has to do what they expect. And if it doesn't, it takes about zero time for that word to get out on the street and people stop buying the item.
HD DVD and Bluray want to be very cautious how many barriers they put up, AND how much they spend building protection over what they'll gain. Protection will be cracked and customers will be pissed off. And if you spent a lot of money getting there, no one buys the machines, AND someone cracks the format, the profits that will come in to cover all that cost will be pathetic. Making a mistake like that is mighty expensive.
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Frankly this isn't rocket science. The average consumer will take the box home. It won't work. And off they'll go to the store to hear "well to make it work you'll need one of these 1000-10,000 dollar TV's" and the consumer will say "here's your box back thank you but no thank you".
Frankly these folks are spending a lot of effort into something that often takes far less effort to break (meaning security). Typically you build a security code so that you can keep 50-75% of the people honest who might not otherwise be, a barrier that is not too hard to build and not impossible to breach, and you have a nice balance of cost vs return. These folks think they are building the Titanic. 30 days after it's released they're going to find their years of work goes the same direction the Titanic did.
They are not killing the market. But they will frustrate and turn away a lot of customers who encounter difficulties in what they expect to be able to do. Customers will expect these things to work as old VCR's did, watch a movie on a prerecorded item, record a show in HD and move the movies of some childs birthday to a high capacity video disc.
How will customers respond when they get messages like "you can't do this" or "sorry that show is not recordable"? Have a look at how people feel about the cable industry. People will look at their alternatives, probably standard DVD+RW at this point, and consider that they didn't have all these "problems" with that technology. They'll take the lower hit in quality for less issues. And those billions of R&D spent will be wasted until they go back and work to get it right.
These companies aren't stupid, despite how we technologists tend to think of them. But they do make mistakes. They are trying to judge how much "complication" the average consumer is willing to put up with. What I strongly believe they are misjudging in a generation that often has a hard time just figuring how to SET UP Hd, is that customers of today have an extremely low tolerance for anything that doesn't work simply and just like it's previous generation worked. People don't have time to muck with things or learn. It has to be simple. It has to do what they expect. And if it doesn't, it takes about zero time for that word to get out on the street and people stop buying the item.
HD DVD and Bluray want to be very cautious how many barriers they put up, AND how much they spend building protection over what they'll gain. Protection will be cracked and customers will be pissed off. And if you spent a lot of money getting there, no one buys the machines, AND someone cracks the format, the profits that will come in to cover all that cost will be pathetic. Making a mistake like that is mighty expensive.
Food for thought :)