Seeing that the consumer society is rapidly becoming more mobile, both Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox have announced that additional versions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Live Free or Die Hard for portable movie players and computer viewing. Up until now, on the go movie fans were left with the options of either ripping their own DVDs with varying success, or pay for yet another version of any film they wanted to watch on their iPods. And if users owned another video player, they were stuck with only the option of ripping their own DVDs (there are other downloadable movie options for PC, but they usually have some sort of time based viewing restriction).

But the move by both Warners and Fox to begin offering PVP content on all their DVDs, not only increases the value of the DVDs, but also assures the quality of movie encoding for watching on computers and media players. Unfortunately, it also makes it easier for pirates as Hollywood will be doing the work for them. But not really. Serious pirates already know how to rip, re-encode and reauthor DVDs for the black market. So offering additional version for iPod is a plus more for legitimate viewers buying the DVDs.

It may just be an experiment, but it seems that movie studios may finally be getting the message. The best way to combat piracy is to give their audience more choices, not sue them into oblivion.