Just over a week of Sony making the announcement that they will not use the Image Constraint Token (ICT) flag in their Blu-ray movies, Universal, Paramount, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox have all decided to opt against the flag also, at least until further notice. This flag is part of the AACS functionality, which forces the picture to downscale to a maximum of 1/4 Full HD (960 x 540). While this resolution is more than that of entry level Plasma TVs (usually a native res. of 848 x 480), this is much less than that of even native 720p displays which have a native resolution of at least 1280 x 720.
While
this ICT flag is aimed at forcing the use of HDCP enabled connections to prevent piracy, unfortunately it affects honest paying customers who bought a HDTV sets lacking a HDMI or HDCP compliant interface, especially the early buyers. As a result, while this flag may be designed to fight piracy, it effectively punishes those who bought a non compliant HD display or one before HDCP support started becoming standard on most high definition displays.
So far,
Warner Brothers is the only major studio that plan on using the flag, at least on some of their first titles. With so many studios backing off from ICT, this could mean one of two things: Either the ICT flag is dead on arrival or they are backing away from it as a temporary measure to give the next generation of DVD players a boost before they start putting the ICT flag into their releases. Thanks to hazel_wu for letting us know about this news:
In my opinion, dropping ICT is mainly just a way of encouraging consumers to take on the players. There is a very good chance that several years later when the majority of consumers have got hooked on HD movies (assuming this happens), they will start putting the ICT into new releases to get those with incompliant TVs to think of buying a new set if they want to get their full picture quality back.
hazel_wu added: Finally some good news about HD and AACS... at least for a while.
Source: ars technica
