[opendtv] EE Times: Hollywood, Silicon Valley quarrel over digital media

From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:48:58 +0000

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4416718/Hollywood--Silicon-Valley-argue-over-digital-media

Hollywood, Silicon Valley quarrel over digital media
Rick Merritt
6/19/2013 9:06 AM EDT

Old arguments simmered and sometimes erupted in the latest meeting of this odd
married couple with its long, unsettled spats over copy protection and formats.
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Like an old married couple, Hollywood and Silicon Valley
keep fighting the same old arguments. The latest spat erupted at the first
meeting of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers held on the
Stanford campus here.

Hollywood claims Silicon Valley doesn't do enough to protect its content. The
Valley counters Hollywood doesn't put out its video in ways attractive enough
for the digital age.

Meanwhile the next big format war is brewing. And the Valley is still enamored
as ever with each new sexy codec that comes along.

On the codec front, a Google engineering manager said the search giant locked
down the code stream and held an industry summit two weeks ago for its VP9
codec. It showed the royalty-free codec it evolved from VP8 that Google
acquired with On2 Technologies delivering streams while using roughly half the
CPU horsepower of today's H.264.

The free, fast codec will be much more attractive than the competing H.265 (aka
HEVC), said Google's Jan Skoglund, claiming H.265 will carry even high
royalties than its predecessor. Industry giants are still debating terms for
H.265 at the MPEG LA.

Expect more shoes to fall in this debate over the next year as debate heats up
and crystallizes over patent terms for both codecs. Chip makers, many of whom
attended the VP9 summit, are likely to carve support for both options into
silicon. Meanwhile Google engineers are already turning their attention to a
VP10 generation, said Skoglund.

The format wars, 2013 edition

As techies debate the next hot media technology, a new format war is brewing.

TV makers came to CES last January trumpeting UltraHD, The quad-resolution high
def picture was their hope to re-ignite interest in giant flat panels after
stereo 3-D failed to ignite the market.

Hollywood wants something different. Rushing to more pixels is an easy but
unsatisfying answer, said one studio exec who asked to be unnamed.

Instead, content owners are shopping ideas such as expanding the color gamut
which is still locked in the olden days of what could be shown on a CRT.
Today's LCDs can show a much wider set of colors and consumers will notice the
difference. By contrast they will need huge screens to detect the difference
more pixels bring with UltraHD, the exec said.

In addition, Hollywood has made proposals for extending the dynamic color range
and contrast in the next big format. Concepts for more immersive audio and
faster frame rates also are under discussion. The big questions are whether the
two sides can agree on all the new nuances and find a way to boil them down to
a simple concept or number to sell to consumers.

"Lots of bilateral discussions are going on now [about the next format, and]
forums will probably pop up in the future to try to resolve some of this
stuff," the exec said.

Sounds like Blu-ray vs. HD DVD and VHS vs. Betamax all over again. But this
time the format is not focused on a cartridge or shiny disk. These days it's
all digital, networked delivery-and that's the other and biggest old on-going
argument.
Seeing the light of Ultraviolet
The old debate over copy protection, started in the late 1990's Napster era,
still grinds on as the most bitter of all the arguments. But there are a few
glimmers of progress.

Hollywood has been crafting for several years a carrot to attract consumers to
pay for digital video online. Called Ultraviolet, it sports a fully defined
program with dozens of backers, but so far adoption has been slow.

Twelve million people have Ultraviolet accounts across about four countries
where it is offered. Seven studios and three other content owners have put out
more than 9,700 titles in the UV format so far, supporting all major operating
systems.

But devices natively supporting UV have yet to hit the market in a big way, and
marketing for the effort has been nearly non-existent. Some note UV has failed
to go viral, and has been passed by in favor of other Web offerings.

"I'm not impatient because the platform we are building will last for a long
time," said Mitch Singer, CTO of Sony Pictures Entertainment and one of the
fathers of Ultraviolet.

"The vision is probably right," Singer added. "I don't look at progress
quarterly, but on a much longer time perspective this--it doesn't have to go
viral," he said.

Industry veterans say Ultraviolet has gained broader industry backing than any
copyright protection effort to date. If it does not succeed in its current
form, it will evolve into something that will, they say.

And then the fur flies

Meanwhile content owners say chip makers need to do more to support hardware
root of trust in silicon. They are also smarting from the failure of the
controversial SOPA/PIPA legislation that promised heightened enforcement tools
for shutting down international pirates such as Pirate Bay.

"Copyright works great with the only exception of our complete lack of
enforcement of it," said Singer of Sony Pictures Entertainment in a panel on
the hot-button topic.

By the end of the evening fur started to fly as panelists elbowed each other in
all the old wounded places.

"The idea that you have to change your business model because people are
stealing your music rubs me the wrong way," said Singer. "I'd like the dialog
to be about what we can do to help manage online theft," he said.

"No one is condoning theft, said Fred von Lohmann a long time representative of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now the legal director of copyright at
Google. "We've invested a lot to help you--I could go through a list of the
things we have done for free to help you," he said.

"Google supported half of SOPA [and] we are doing more on the ad side today
than the proposed law would have required, so there's progress there" von
Lohmann added. But "site blocking and search censorship are currently not part
of the discussion," he said.

Von Lohmann noted YouTube and other Web giants are seeking premium content
creators without ties to theaters and cable TV, willing to put out movies and
shows direct to consumers. Singer countered that a high publicized five-movie
deal between entrepreneur Mark Cuban and director Stephen Soderbergh fizzled
after the first direct-to-consumer flick called "Bubbles" flopped.

Meanwhile studios are still trying to wield a big stick against pirates. One
panelist mentioned reports of a "secret room" at NBC Universal where network
techs track illegal downloads and send out tens of thousands of
cease-and-desist notices every hour.

Campaigns to sue individuals largely ended around 2008. But von Lohmann noted a
few highly publicized judgments for millions of dollars threatened to create "a
chilling effect on innovators" and a "nuclear winter" in digital media.

"I've heard before the argument that copyright stifles innovation, yet we're
the most innovative country in the world," countered Singer of Sony. "The idea
we need to move to this permissive innovative state is complete nonsense," he
said.

"It's unfortunate I have as many lawyers as engineers," said Eric Klinker, CEO
of BitTorrent. "Perhaps it's the natural state in copyright that no one is
happy," he said.

An administrator from the University of Southern California-one of many
colleges that has been embroiled in copyright infringement litigation over its
students' behavior-talked about changing cultural norms.

Student's downloading free movies "do not think they are doing anything wrong,"
he said. "They believe Hollywood makes a lot of money so they are not hurting
anyone," he said.

"What college kid thinks it's legal when they are downloading in their dorm the
move that's playing at the theater?" countered Singer. "They need to see big
brother is watching," he said, alluding to efforts to enlist ISPs to send out
more warnings.

Stephen Balogh, a tech policy specialist at Intel and head of several copyright
protection initiatives, defended Silicon Valley's work on efforts to block
piracy.

"You can't create impenetrable technologies, but you try to make it more costly
to circumvent them than to get media legitimately," Balogh said. "These
[content protection] technologies aren't perfect, but we've done this for
years, we're still doing it and hopefully we've done a better job with
Ultraviolet," he said.

At best the technical approaches "keep lazy people honest," quipped Singer,
suggesting the old arguments in the marriage of Hollywood and Silicon Valley
will continue.

"If we could get agreement on legislation like SIPA/POPA, that would be great,
but for now we're going down the path of working as partners with Silicon
Valley and that seems to be a better approach," he said,

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[opendtv] EE Times: Hollywood, Silicon Valley quarrel over digital media

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