Palm Pictures the parent company of Manga has decided to use Macrovision's Safe Disc technology to protect their discs. They have signed a 5-year deal to include the safe disc technology on all of their DVDs and VHS Tapes.

The Safe Disc technology has a "key" printed on to each disc so that the original disc is required in order for it to work. Without this "key" the disc will not boot. This prevents people from re-mastering the disc or ripping the image to distribute via the Internet.

While this will help to protect their shows from piracy (and I'm sure non of you watch pirated anime) there is a rather undeniable downside to the safe disc technology that happen to be overlooked (ignored) by the folk at Palm Pictures. The downside is that it affects picture quality. I'm not sure, but it seems that people tend to buy DVDs for their better picture quality. Oh, sure there are other things like extras, better sound, and more episodes per disc. However, picture quality is usually the number 1 reason. As it stands, Manga is the only company using the macrovision technology in their DVDs.