For many businesses that rely on the distribution of HD or "High Definition" video content, there is some potential bad news coming. That "bad news" in my opinion will affect Sports Bars and Restaurants more so than any other industry.

At the risk of oversimplifying this, I will attempt to breakdown what this means to our customers over the next few paragraphs. 

The AACS and the "Final Adopter Agreement"

To start, the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is basically a group of manufactures responsible for implementing standards that will make it impossible to copy digital copyrighted material. That goal seems noble but it is going to be costly to consumers. More on that later. 

The AACS license agreement has a term called the "Analog Sunset." The analog sunset is what we are talking about here in this article. This new license agreement more or less states that going forward all HD video content must be sent out of source devices as digital only. 

That means it will have to be delivered via the HDMI port and not the component video connection. Since most HD video distribution systems AV contractors have installed currently use the component or RGB analog outputs, not the HDMI ports, you can see where the potential problem lies. Typically contractors used the component video connections because they were much more reliable and much less expensive for our customers, yet still delivered great pictures. Too good apparently.

Specifically, the "analog sunset" provision means eventually new hardware such as Blu-Ray players won't even have component video outputs. This forces us to use the HDMI if we want to take advantage of the optimal quality signal. In addition older devices that do still have component video outputs will have the quality of the signal scaled back to a max of 480p, instead of 1080i. This is done via a digital "flag" called ICT (Image Constraint Token).

This will include not only Blu-Ray players but Cable TV boxes, Satellite receivers, VUDU players, ROKU boxes and so on. The time table on when exactly this will all happen is sort of left to the content providers. However my manufacturers tell me that they may start implementing some of this, as early as January 1st, 2011.

For more information and opinions check out this article on the AACS. I really like this guys "take" on the situation. There is another more detailed article here on the CEPRO website.

To read more about the specifics of this and how it may affect you, download the complete AACS agreement below.