Hollywood STILL doesn't get it!
Years ago Hollywood sued Sony over the BetaMax, claiming that VCR functionality would ruin their business. This is just another example of technology companies dragging Hollywood, kicking & screaming, to the money well. While reports have surfaced showing that illegal music downloads have little impact on music sales, industry insiders continue to slow down the adoption of new technologies that could mint them money.

Hollywood's latest target, HDTV. While Hollywood continues to fight about potential piracy of high definition content they continue to miss the big picture: Speeding up adoption of HDTV will actually slow potential piracy... and here is why. It is currently VERY hard for the average consumer to download video content today. While networks like BitTorrent make it easy to download very large video files, these networks are not easy to use, much less understand for the average consumer. Heck, it takes me hours explaining it to my friends here at MIT! Now imagine that instead of downloading a 400MB show, you have to try and find a network to download a 1.3 GB show... in an XVID codec that 99% of consumers won't know how to even play!

Hollywood should speed up the adoption of HDTV to help them create spur current markets (like HD-DVDs, consumer HD Camcorders, etc.) as well as spur the creation of markets we can't even think of. One of the issues that frustrates me most about this issue is that any digital rights management technology put into these products will be thwarted in a matter of months. Heck, the AAC DRM technology employed by Apple in iTunes has now been made irrelevant.