By Paul Sweeting
ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING
AUG. 5 | When 20th Century Fox officials announced their studio's support for Blu-ray Disc, based on the format's purportedly superior copy protection, the HD DVD camp all but called them a bunch of liars and idiots.
"Today's announcement by 20th Century Fox regarding its support of the Blu-ray Disc format is surprising and misleading in terms of which format provides for more robust copy protection," the HD DVD group said in a statement issued through a Warner spokesperson.
"HD DVD provides robust, renewable and standardized content protection coupled with proven reliability, cost effectiveness and flexibility, which is why many major film studios have announced support for the HD DVD format."
Responses from several Fox officials were unprintable.
The harshness of the exchange, in part, reflects growing tension over the escalating format war.
But in the case of Fox and Warner, it also reflects still-raw feelings between the two studios dating back to the earliest days of DVD. Then, as now, the bone of contention was copy protection.
As a co-developer of the DVD, Warner Bros., under then-home video president Warren Lieberfarb, took the clear lead role in moving the industry into the new format.
In addition to the petty jealousies that arose, however, there also were substantive differences among the studios over the format's readiness.
Fox, in particular, was leery of the CSS encryption system developed by Toshiba and endorsed by Warner.
Even for its time, CSS was less than state-of-the-art. But developing a new encryption system would have meant a delay.
Warner persuaded the studios to accept CSS as "good enough," and Fox, reluctantly, went along.
In short order, both sides were proved right. CSS was quickly hacked. But the format has been a huge success nonetheless.
Mutual vindication hardly ended the dispute, however. And in the years since, Fox and Warner officials have rarely let an opportunity to snipe at each other go by.
"We were idiots to build a business we couldn't protect," Fox parent News Corp. president Peter Chernin declared recently.
"If we'd listened to them, we'd still be waiting," a Warner exec has said.
The lingering resentment over CSS is now shaping the debate over high-definition formats.
Both camps have agreed to adopt the AACS encryption system developed by Toshiba, Sony, Microsoft, IBM, Warner and Disney.
But in deciding which camp to go with, Fox asked each to adopt an additional layer of encryption developed by Cryptography Research Inc.
Warner and HD DVD said no, declaring the CRI system unnecessary and potentially even harmful. Blu-ray said yes.
"They said [the CRI system] wouldn't work, but they never wanted to do the analysis," a Fox source said of the HD DVD camp. "We made that mistake last time, but we're not going to do it again."
The replay of the copy-protection dispute is not the only golden oldie to be heard in the high-def debate.
At its core, the format war is largely the continuation of an argument between Sony and Warner/Toshiba that stretches back to the first DVD battle and has never really seen peace.
While Toshiba was developing what became DVD, Sony was perfecting what it called the Multi-media CD, based on the CD technology it had developed (and patented) in the '80s.
Although a compromise was reached, today's format is based largely on Toshiba's work.
Still, Sony tried again to extend its CD technology with Super Audio CD. But once again, Warner supported DVD-Audio, based on Toshiba's technology. (Time Warner has since sold Warner Bros. Records, and both SACD and DVD-A have been flops.)
With Blu-ray, Sony abandoned the CD but purposely developed a technology that was not DVD.
For both the hardware makers and the studios, the argument over DVD has dragged on with only superficial peace for nearly a decade.
It's time to get over it.
