I’m a big fan of my AppleTV, and I was super supportive of the recently-announced AppleTV Take 2, which allows all 12 of us who have one to purchase music and movies from the iTunes store directly from the TV, with no computer required. I finally got around to installing the software a week or so ago, and rented Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (yes, seriously) without incident.
But apparently, I’m one of the lucky ones??????or, maybe it’s just that I have a newish (although kind of a shitty) TV which I connect to the AppleTV via RCA cables masquerading as component cables. BoingBoing passes along a report that iTunes movie rentals won’t play on some TVs, because of a DRM called High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HBDCP. HBDCP apparently blocks rentals from being played on monitors that talk to the AppleTV via a DVI or HDMI connection??????basically, anyone using a video projector or computer monitor, and pretty much anyone using a flat-screen TV purchased before 2005.
So, essentially, Apple’s DRM is so constrictive that anyone who hasn’t bought a new TV in the last three years will be forced to do so in order to rent iTunes movies. As BoingBoing’s Cory Doctrow points out, this punishes consumers to the point where it becomes hard to see why anyone would go the legal way when DRM-free films are easier to get.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog