Pirates now offering Blu-ray movies, kind of
Blu-ray is the high-definition format of choice for movies and games which is starting to gain in popularity. But that popularity could be adversely affected by Chinese pirates who are starting to offer fake Blu-ray discs for sale. Is it time for Hollywood to panic?
Blu-ray, as a format for movies, seemed to be gaining a bit of a foothold, with retailers starting to dedicate healthy shelf space to it, and new movies such as The Dark Knight shifting units. There’s also the forthcoming Black Friday which will surely see the price of Blu-ray players decrease considerably.
However, a few things are going against the format. First came the global economic collapse which is seeing many people tighten their belts and prevented them spending their hard-earned on luxury goods. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Blu-ray is now going to have to start contending with pirates.
Ars Technica is reporting that authorities in Shenzhen, China recently found a shipment of 800 fake Blu-ray discs containing the latest movies. The MPAA is claiming this to be the first seizure of this kind in China.
The pirated discs aren’t actually Blu-ray, but they are high-def, and good enough quality to fool the vast majority of consumers. The pirates are cracking Blu-ray’s AACS and BD+ encryption and then re-encoding them in to the AVCHD format. While not offering full 1080p resolution, these will play back at 720p. The added advantage for the pirates is that the reduction in resolution means the movies will fit on regular DVDs.
The movie industry is obviously concerned and is right to be because there’s no question that DVD piracy has affected retail DVD sales considerably. The same could now happen for Blu-ray discs but the timing could mean the format actually gets hindered from really catching on in the first place.
With SD DVDs continuing to sell and high definition downloads becoming more feasible, Blu-ray is going to struggle to fight the war on all fronts, and the pirates have just opened up a new one.
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November 19th, 2008
But they’ve been pirating DVD’s for years Dave and that wasn’t the death of that format! Throughout SE Asia you find bootleg DVD’s, and mostly dual-layer DVD-9’s shrunk to single layer DVD-5. And ripping Blu-ray movies has been going on for a long time, torrents have been full of them for a couple years.
November 19th, 2008
Hey, Dave, don’t you know you’re supposed to be a PS3 fanboy, and that means at the end of this article, you were supposed to put something like “but it doesn’t matter because Sony always does everything right so bluray will sell to every person on the planet.”
Bluray has a hard time ahead of it. HD hasn’t caught on over as much of the world as we would like to think, beisdes all that you have said, so it is fighting over a smaller piece of the pie than DVD was in its infancy, and that will make prices harder to control and bring down to a level more people will buy in the long run, as well, giving pirate a big edge.