Conspiracy Theory is a fun movie starring Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. Mel Gibson has all sorts of whacky ideas about the government, big corporations, and stealth helicopters. Most of his ideas are really quite far fetched, but one of them turns out to be true.

Some people think that Hollywood is in a conspiracy the likes of which Jerry Fletcher has never seen. Some people with a little too much time on their hands are saying that Hollywood studios, Microsoft, Sony, Toshiba, et al, are all in a conspiracy to make us buy into HDMI/AACS now and get screwed later. The plan is pretty simple - no ICT now, lots of ICT later. That is, make sure movies don’t have ICT to give consumers and especially early HDTV adopters warm fuzzy fealings. Then when everybody’s bought HD DVD and BD players, ZING! Introduce ICT on all movies. Consumers will already have bought into the technology big time so they won’t be able to do anything about it.

ASIDE: Remember that ICT stands for “Image Constraint Token”. If this is enabled on a BD or HD DVD disc, it’ll mean that you won’t be able to watch a BD or HD DVD movie in its full HD glory over the player’s analog outputs. You’ll be constrained to 960 x 540. Yuck!

Personally, I don’t believe that there is any such conspiracy. I think that each each studio hit upon this strategy on their own. Or they at least decided to follow the leader, seeing what a great idea it was. Seriously! Trying to get all those companies to agree is like trying to put the worms back into the dirt when it rains. But I have a dreadful feeling that one day all BD and HD DVD movies will indeed have the ICT flag enabled.

Hollywood reportedly in agreement to delay forced quality downgrades for Blu-ray, HD DVD