Why I'm hopeful

By the end of the decade, I think DRM is going to be a non-issue. It's not going to be more Draconian -- it'll be more transparent. Sony, a company infamous for their rootkit copy protection, still had the foresight to eliminate the region protection between the US and Japan for the PlayStation 3 and Blu-Ray.

In some ways, the HD ecosystem is going to buy time to help DRM reach that magic steady state that we enjoy with books. With HD movies requiring huge amounts of space, there's already a barrier to casual copying if only for HDD space issues. The HD-DVD rips that have been unleashed onto the Internet still represents gigabytes and gigabytes of storage. As bandwidth and HDD space increases, technologies such as BD+ potentially will maintain sufficient copy protection to prevent casual copying while still ensuring that the optical disc is a) not counterfeit and b) can be used for managed copy (allowing you to transcode the content to portable players). Potentially being the key phrase – the industry has had rough enough start with HDCP.

People buy more DVDs than music CDs because they see it as a better value. Fortunately, HD content remains aggressively priced. Although Blu-Ray and HD-DVD products are more expensive than DVD products, prices will see more parity as production ramps up and more consumers transition to HD. DVD players launched at $1000 (FiringSquad’s retired Editor-in-Chief Kenn Hwang spent that much on his Sony DVP-S7000) and by 2009 there will be no more analog TV in the United States.

I'm even hopeful about Hollywood increasing the visibility of screenwriters in the industry. As movies like Fight Club and TV shows like 24 and Heroes continue to push the envelope of storytelling and captivate an increasingly sophisticated audience, writers are increasingly forced to write more sophisticated movies. A screenplay from a 1990's Van Damme movie wouldn't fly today. Would any movie which uses "it was just a dream" as a plot device work today? Only if it's told like A Beautiful Mind. The elite group of screenwriters who are capable of writing such movies is relatively small, and that is good news because it means Hollywood only needs to spend a lot of money on a few number of people. So if anyone you know is a creative executive at a studio, debate with them why stories like Thank You For Smoking, Good Will Hunting, Napoleon Dynamite, Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Nemo or God forbid, Titanic were more successful than Stealth, Lady in the Water, Basic Instinct 2, Poseidon, and Flushed Away...