Analog HD here for the foreseeable future
Sound & Vision magazine last week reported some fantastic news for the HDTV early adopters and the custom system integrators of the world. S&V quotes Don Eklund, Senior VP for Advanced Technologies for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as saying,
“we have no plan to implement the Image Constraint Token. All of Sony’s titles will come out of the analog output at full definition.“
Of course, Sony can only speak for their movies on Blu-Ray Disc, and he did add that this includes all of their titles for the foreseeable future. That puts serious pressure on the other studios releasing on either Blu-Ray Disc or HD-DVD to follow suit.
To review, the biggest threat to component video recently has been this ‘image constraint token’ that will allow a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc publisher to optionally downrez or disable the analog component vdieo outputs of the next gen high-def disc players. Up until now, all the studios of been silent as to whether they would use the option or not. Using that option would force the use of HDMI, which has a several issues.
This is good for the early adodter of HDTV - the several million consumers that purchased an HDTV before DVI/HDMI/HDCP became mainstream last year. This is also good news for the custom system integrator because they can continue to rely on the flexibility of analog component video to make multiroom AV systems possible. And naturally this is a good thing for Neothings, since we are offering primarily analog solutions. There is currently no better way to get HD video from one side of a house to the other once it pops out of whatever box it came out of.