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Blu-ray Prize Pack!

Bullish on Blu-ray? Need something to watch on that new player? Premiere.com and Soundandvisionmag.com have joined forces to give away a prize pack of eight Blu-ray discs, including The Usual Suspects, The Sentinel, Phone Booth, and Planet of the Apes to one lucky visitor.

Just in case you've been living in a cave for the past week--or perhaps just live a normal healthy life, in which case I envy you--then you've heard about the Steve Jobs DRM manifesto. Jobs wants to have his DRM and denounce it too. His adroit repositioning of himself in the public eye bodes well for the continued vigor of iPod sales. The first and most amusing reaction came from the Recording Industry Antichrist of America, which enthused: "Apple's offer to license FairPlay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels." It would also mollify various European regulators who object to the binding of iTunes downloads to iPods. Only problem is, Apple offered to do no such thing. The emailed missive has not appeared on the RIAA site. More relevant, perhaps, was EMI's announcement that a large percentage of its catalogue would become available via no-DRM MP3 downloads. Apparently the Norah Jones experiment was a success. Warning: While MP3 is immune to DRM, it is not immune to watermarking that would embed purchase information in the track metadata. If a download with your name on it ends up in the P2P moshpit, you could be in big trouble.

There's probably a smug look on the face of the cynics among us right now. You know, the types who are so negative about the format war that they're willing to ignore the fact that we not only have high-def on a disc, but we have the best HD we've ever seen and heard, period. And Toshiba, which launched the HD DVD format with two players in Spring of 2006, released its second generation players in December and January, with not even a full year in between the two generations.