Britney’s mates stole your TV

Estate Exterior SE5
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.

Noticed a post by a cat called Mike Evangelist – an ex-Appleteer who was involved in the development in lickworthy products such as Final Cut Pro and is urging a boycott of HD. Apart from playing back gorgeous 1080p trailers for shite video game like mainstream films on my trusty Mac I do not have HD. The people who control the bandwidth in the UK seem to have decided that UK Gold +1 (the channel for when you forgot when the repeat of ‘Birds of a Feather’ was on but were only off by one hour) and endless streams of soontobeanescort showbiz rejects desperately attempting to get livestock to text in to win or whatever are a better application for all those bytes. Actually, the only thing separating the girl with the desperate eyes and bad skin on UK Quiz thing whatever from, say, Kate Garraway is access to PR, luck and better grooming – but I digress.

Soon the content creeps are going to attempt to fill their troughs with another ‘buy what you have in a snazzy new format’ type deal with the emergence of high def DVD formats. I’m not too bothered as I reckon one will see ‘Ally McBeal Remastered’ long before anything I would want emerges but Mike’s point is a better one.

The day when all of our senses will be subject to 'rights management', with a Direct Debit to the content goons to compensate them direct any time we say, see or hear anything vaguely copyrighted is now closer. If this stops gimps from using catchphrases from the latest unthreatening sitcom practictioners as every utterance of ‘Am I bovvered, I’m a lady etc’ incurs a terrible cost mankind will have moved forward. However…

When the hidefwhatever discs come, they will have more strings attached than a piece of well knit winter clothing. You will only be able to play them back if they phone home over the net and say both the disc and device are suitably locked down. Not to mention that the ‘rights’ of the discs owner (who is seen by the content clowns as a criminal conspirator) can be changed at any point. It can be assumes that the real dream is a kind of personal pay per view, where you buy a nice silver disc that charges you every time you use it and extra when there are friends round.

One can only hope that angry consumers, crackers, hackers and dodgy Far Eastern manufacturers will render this backdoor parasitism as impotent as the DVD Region nonsense. Only buy what you can own, kids!