Another report on this – but this one has some more info that is interesting:
Also on Wednesday, Blu-ray backer Hewlett-Packard said it has appealed to the group to incorporate two HD DVD features: mandatory “managed copy,” which will mean consumers will always be allowed to copy movies to their computers’ hard drives, and iHD, a Microsoft-designed technology for interactive features.
“Managed Copy” is one of the features of AACS, that both BD and HD-DVD use. But it seems the difference is HD-DVD has made it mandatory for all content, while it is optional for BD. This is the biggest reason MS and Intel backed HD-DVD – it allows copying content off the disc onto a hard drive to use on a media server, etc. Of course they have a vested interest – and PC makers, like HP, would benefit too. I think mandatory managed copy would actually be a good thing.
iHD seems more like a sop to MS, and perhaps Toshiba. Since they developed iHD (yay, another new platform, just what we needed) and it is part of HD-DVD, adding managed copy and iHD to BD would make MS happy, and probably get their official backing. And it might help convince Toshiba to drop HD-DVD since it’d give them some intellectual property in BD. Of course, it would complicate all BD systems by having to support BD-Java and iHD.
