The format war that's already over might just stick around a little longer: At the Home Media Expo, various analysts predict that both formats are going to stick around and that we'll see HD media surpass standard definition DVD by 2012. And if people can't buy the Blu-ray TV, they'll just have to get HD DVD to go with their HDTV, won't they? Those poor people will have a hard time playing the upcoming Blu-ray only (Pixar being closely tied to Disney, it's no surprise) Pixar titles.

Variety has a report to contradict that and indicating that Universal is close to going format neutral. There's just one problem here: their main source is the same guy that's promoting BD+ with the "unbreakable for 10 years" tagline, so I wouldn't give that story too much credit.

New Line, the last major HD holdout, has also announced their move towards HD, and they're going format neutral. Now the question will be when the LOTR trilogy comes out - given the length of these titles, it should be interesting to compare the Blu-ray and HD DVD release and get some closure on the discussion if the additional space really matters - so far the 20 gigs seem to do very little in terms of picture quality.

Following reports from the HD DVD camp in Europe, the PR machine is also picking up steam in the US - they're reporting a considerable increase in player and software sales (comparing the first and second quarter) whereas Blu-ray player sales have gone down.

Meanwhile, after closing a deal with Disney to offer high def rentals via the Xbox360, CinemaNow has also signed a deal with Microsoft to offer their catalog through the Xbox live service - so Microsoft is definitely getting serious about alternatives to physical distribution, despite their support for HD DVD.

Moving on to music, the suing P2P machine has suffered a setback in Europe, with the general counsel's opinion on whether ISPs should reveal subscriber data to the industry - according to Juliane Kokott, that personal information may only be shared with government agencies and not private entities so that they can pursue civil litigation. At least things are going for the industry in Germany, where courts ordered that a bunch of eDonkey servers be taken offline.

And in the online radio world, the big players are less than happy with SoundExchange's attempts to shove DRM down their throats (and by proxy, our throats). Could it all have been a carefully executed maneuver to DRM-ize online music?

Last but not least, while Allofmp3 is no more, its successors have just become more accessible again, when a Moscow court ruled that Visa had no rights to terminate their contract with the parent company of all these online music stores.

While the music industry is still busy suing P2P users, but has just incurred a major loss when the courts forced them to award all attorney fees to one of those users they sued and lost - radio stations are buying P2P usage data to shape their playlists. So, when will the RIAA sue Clear Channel?

All the shredding of documents outlining under the table deals won't help Sony to keep this from the EU regulators: revenue sharing is how they get their product into the rental market.

And we look forward to a round of piracy whining from the MPAA - according to VideoBusiness, people are spending less money on movies this year. Of course, if you buy an X360 or even a PS3 and a few games (and non entertainment related issues like gas prices), you have to cut down somewhere else, won't you?

It didn't take long - as I predicted, the Blu-ray camp decries that the HD DVD camp didn't include consoles in the statistics when they claim to hold a 3:1 lead over Blu-ray. The store also contains the leading neutral studio - Warner - 's take on the situation - they believe standalone player sales matter more than console sales (and I can't help but agree on that point, a noisy console isn't exactly a component I'd want to add to my home theater).

Meanwhile, a few lucky people will get a $99 HD DVD player. There's been some confusion as to who is eligible for this promotion - by the looks of it, you need to attend the Home Media Expo in Vegas next week.

Some people find it annoying, I find it rather hilarious how both competing HD camps keep on spinning the facts - I can only hope enough people realize that there's a lot more spin than truth floating around. This weekend we have Sony claiming that HD DVD would be dead within months, and Microsoft rebuffing that claim.

Amongst all the (severely overinflated and often presented without the appropriate context) statistics about copyright infringement, there's one area that has gone largely unnoticed: Copyfraud - or false copyright claims on non protected works.

Maybe it was the weekend or the holiday season, but we didn't really feel the Slashdot hit this time when news broke about the latest in Microsoft DRM circumvention: the latest FairUse4WM catches up with Microsoft's latest tricks and even liberates your Zune titles.

Following the Wall Street Journal's article that the EU antitrust regulators are looking into Blu-ray, Blu-ray fanboys everywhere were quick to decry this is a nothing but an act of desperation by the HD DVD camp. However, that's far from the truth: in fact, not only did the EU investigation start a year ago (so back when HD DVD still owned the market) with focus on both camps, but there was an investigation in the US as well, and the US Department of Justice actually received complaints as early as 2002 - and the major Blu-ray proponents were under increased scrutiny even before the DVD.

Meanwhile, after a lot of back and forth, the 60GB PS3 has (at least temporarily) become the cheapest Blu-ray player in the US with its price dropping to $499 (there's a Sony standalone player coming for the same price point). However, as I said, temporarily as the 60GB model is apparently EOL and will be replaced by an 80GB model based on the European hardware (thus there'll no longer be any hardware to support PS2 games, rather old software is running in emulation mode) and the same old $599 price point.

And in what will undoubtedly trigger another statistics from the opposing camp, the HD DVD camp claims it's outselling Blu-ray by a 3:1 margin on hardware in Europe. I can already predict that the Blu-ray camp's counterclaim will be based on the total number of Blu-ray capable devices (so essentially it's a statistic about how many PS3's have been sold)..

After its rootkit fiasco last year, Sony has finally found a PR spin: they're no longer the bad guy, rather they are suing the maker of their rootkit for negligence, unfair business practices and delivering a software that did not perform as warranted. I guess performing as warranted would mean nobody found the rootkit, right?

After suing various major software makers for not using their copy protection software, Media Rights Technologies have set their sights on a new target: online radio stations. They are petitioning the Library of Congress to pull the statutory licenses of most online radio stations, on the grounds that those stations violate their license by not making it more difficult to prevent the recording of the music they are broadcasting.

And speaking of online radio, after a federal appeals court denied an emergency stay on the massive royalty hike for online radio that's supposed to go into effect this very weekend, RIAA led SoundExchange has revised their plans somewhat and are now offering lower rates to smaller stations, if stations turn over more user data and take steps to prevent the recording of the music they are broadcasting (did I just repeat myself?).

"Structural DVD protection" (AKA corrupt discs) on DVD-Rs? Macrovision, killer of such useful programs like DVD Decrypter, and corruptor of video analog video signals worldwide since the VHS age, has come up with a way to make RipGuard work on recordable DVDs.

CPRM protection on recordable DVDs (used mainly on standalone recorders) has just gotten a little leakier in Japan: Despite the objection of the MPAA's local section, the government has approved a plan that would permit up to 10 copies be made from a recorded TV program. However, you're still not allowed to make a copy of a copy (so that's in line with SCMS that has been around on standalone audio recorders ever since the introduction of DAT).

How long should copyright last? According to RIAA, MPAA and other copyright organizations, indefinitely. However, those are the organizations that couldn't even recount the reasons why copyright law was created in the first place - they think it's to give them a license to print money. However, the real reason is to further the creation of new works by granting the author a certain amount of exclusivity to reap the benefits of its creation. A Cambridge researcher has looked into how long the optimal protection period should last to best serve the original goal of copyright law - and has come with an answer that has the industry scrambling for counterstudies: Apparently the optimal protection period is just 14 years.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.1.4.5 just made it onto the RIAA's hit list as well: the latest release allows you to make back up of CPPM protected disks (DVD Audio).

On a more personal note, has anyone ever managed to get HDCP working between a Dell 3007WFP(-HC) screen and a nVidia 8600GT(S) card working? The display supports HDCP, so does the card, and according to online reviews, this series of card actually supports HDCP over dual link DVI (needed for the 2560x1600 resolution of this particular display), yet PowerDVD keeps bitching about HDCP. I know the card does HDCP over a single link DVI as there's no bitching when I connect a SyncMaster 225BW instead but GFX card datasheets generally don't mention a word about HDCP over dual link DVI.

Just when the release of BD+ marked a new high in studios' attempts to screw over their own customers, we have news of yet another roadblock to fair use coming our way: audio watermarking. And this one is even format neutral - it is expected that the final AACS specs will mandate watermark detection for all AACS capable devices. Unlike the current AACS, the watermarking doesn't stop you from making copies - it is aimed at stopping the playback of copies upon detection of a watermark on content that's not supposed to be watermarked (e.g. your self-made HD DVD or Blu-ray disc).

Panasonic is about to join LG in offering 4x burning for single and dual layer Blu-ray discs - unlike LG's burner which is supposed to be released this month, Panasonic's offering will be Blu-ray only. However, Samsung, after a lot of forth and back last year, is finally going ahead with a dual format player - the BDP-UP 5000 standalone, scheduled for release in October, will definitely support playback of both competing HD formats.

If you thought the number of layers announced by the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps were a lot, think again: a European science project has just come up with a way to store 500GB (and in the future possibly even 1 TB) on 50 different layers.

This one has the music industry cheering - a Belgian court ordered a local ISP to implement P2P filtering to prevent its subscribers to download copyrighted content. I wonder what those solutions to filtering P2P traffic will be, and how much they'll overshoot the target (they most certainly will).

AT&T is the main proponent for charging you extra to get your VoIP and IPTV packets delivered in time (and possibly also to get you high speed downloads and fast access to your favorite website) - now they've come up with a way to measure just how much it would cost them in terms of extra bandwidth if they are prevented from dividing their pipes into different tiers. However, looking at the numbers, you shouldn't forget that this is the same industry that overbooks your DSL and Cable lines by a factor of 8 (if you're lucky) to 80 (if you're unlucky). The broadband industry today cannot get even close to deliver even a fraction of the bandwidth they're selling to us, and now instead of investing to get closer to their promise, they rather charge us extra to have critical traffic delivered in time because they're too cheap to create a network that can live up to the product they're selling.

The format battle that is already over (Sony has a trademark on this phrase so don't abuse it!) is still very much ongoing in the real world: Toshiba, currently enjoying a boost in sales numbers due to the $100 rebate that ended a bit back, has decided to keep their entry level HD DVD player at $299 (which often translates to a $250 retail price). Meanwhile, you'll get 5 free discs when buying a Blu-ray player.

Amazon has decided to help a lending hand to the HD DVD camp, and in cooperation with Microsoft, they're offering to master 1000 independent movies for HDDVD and distribute them via Amazon.

And to solidify their lead in the interactive part of the format war, Blood Diamond is the first title to make use of HD DVD's capability to load content from the web - unfortunately, you need a firmware upgrade for your player to make this feature work (isn't it great when you get a half finished product? So far, has there been any feature complete HD format player?).

And speaking of the "dead" format - despite lower studio support, the HD DVD camp managed to release more new titles in the 2nd quarter this year - but that still doesn't translate in an equal share in numbers of discs sold. Even in Europe, the PS3 has given Blu-ray enough fuel to overtake HD DVD (which practically owned the HD sector until the release of the PS3) - for instance in Germany. The HD DVD camp hopes to reverse that trend with cheap HD DVD players that should be ready later this year.

Now I have to dig into this a bit: The HD DVD camp's stance is that cheap hardware will eventually drive up HD DVD sales. The Blu-ray camp, and their supporters discards this as insignificant and claim that the fact that there are more studios on their side and that the larger number of titles will instead drive hardware sales. However, neither side really hits the nail on the head - format adoption cannot be broken down into a single equation - it's very much a combination of price (both hardware and software), availability of hardware (prominent displays at the store where you shop for electronics) and availability of software, along with economics (whether the economy is doing good or not, and whether a household has just purchased a HDTV set in anticipation of analog TV being turned off - it all matters). As a good example of why availability alone isn't enough, let's take Sony's very own UMD format (the discs for their Playstation Portable gaming system). I was surprised to see considerable studio support across the board pretty much from the beginning, and stores actually carried a selection of those along with the system. In the end though, the studio support helped very little and today UMD isn't much more than a footnote in digital video history. There are other prominent examples where software sales didn't drive hardware - the PC industry didn't see a significant boost despite the release of the resource hungry Windows Vista - Apple's iTunes isn't driving the sales of their iPod (raise your hand if you don't have a single iTunes bought song on your iPod) - and last but not least: look at Blu-ray before and after the release of the PS3. It is probably the best example on how the industry pushes a format through hardware sales first. The PS3 would probably sell quite a bit better if it were DVD based - since that would have a significant impact on price. However, by combining a next gen console with a next gen video format and dumping a 9 digit figure by selling the product under production cost, the Blu-ray camp hopes that having a few million Blu-ray capable players out there will serve as an entry point into many living rooms. The fact that Blu-ray has overtaken HD DVD shortly after the PS3's release (prior to that, and even today - if you only count standalone player sales, HD DVD does hold the lead, but in face of the number of PS3 consoles out there, that number is all but very significant), is a clear cut sign that if you push the hardware hard enough, software sales will follow. And let's face it, most people buy a PS3 to play video games - if you break down the number of discs sold over the number of Blu-ray capable devices, you'll see that PS3 owners aren't buying Blu-ray movies in droves.

And the studio support could just land Blu-ray in hot water: the EU antitrust regulators have taken an interest in how the current studio alignment came to be.

And as one last piece of good news for the HD DVD camp - recordable dual layer discs are finally on their way - Verbatim should release the first discs before the end of the month. I've beginning to wonder if it'll ever happen seeing as in the recording department, HD DVD isn't just behind, they're basically not in the market at all.

In the ongoing battle by Internet radio stations against a massive royalty hike - the music industry has taken one step back and offers a $2500 royalty cap until the end of the year. After that, they hope to finally be able to push the rate hike through.

The RIAA finally had their wish - but the champagne quickly had to make its way back to the refrigerator: As Allofmp3 disappeared from the web, its parent company launched a new service: MP3Sparks.

Last month's news can be found here.