Let's not sugarcoat things --
BD-Live hasn't exactly been a runaway success. Sure, you could blame some of that on the fact that Profile 2.0 players are just now becoming a) affordable and b) plentiful, but really, it's the uninteresting content that's truly holding it down. According to a report over at
VideoBusiness, that's set to change in 2009. Lionsgate is planning to open a dedicated BD-Live portal (christened Lionsgate Live) which will provide even casual fans with easy access to games, ringtones and filmmaker chats. Other studios are shifting focus to ensure that interactivity is seamlessly integrated and simple to navigate, not to mention getting BD-Live material onto more Blu-ray Discs. In our eyes, '09 is a make or break year for BD-Live; if consumers still aren't digging it by CES 2010, there's a good chance the investments in the technology will taper off. 'Course, those
widgets sure seem to be catching eyes over on the connected HDTV side, so maybe there's hope here after all.
posted Jan 27th 2009 6:56PM
I think most of us would gladly opt for cheaper BD discs without extra content. If you want to add stuff, try alternative versions or better sound. But the whole idea is the movies, not marketing wank.
Agree completely. I for one will more than likely never use any BD Live features. All I want is the film and sound in the best possible HD quality. Alternative versions is fine unless they have just thrown in some previously cut out material that just bloats the film for no good reason.
Studios, please listen and stop hapring this BD Live crap!
Agreed! The BD-Live content on Wall-E is the perfect example. They REQUIRE you to create an account online (on a PC!) and log into their system before accessing any of it. The process took me 20 minutes and wasn't anywhere near worth the effort. To add insult to injury, they said my username was against their rules... the same username I use on every other service in the world. What a pain in the a$$.
Yep, all the extras are worthless. I used to listen to commentaries and such but now...i simply want to watch the movie. BD-Live = BD-worthless.
i hope this picks up it kind of crash with the dark knight when fans where sending in questions to chris nolan .
Good BD live content will remain the exception, not the rule in 2009.
BD live is the digital equivalent of crappy plastic trinkets in a cereal box.
The reason it sucks so often is because it actually takes commitment, time and talent to make something as worthwhile as the movie to which its being attached. Studios are rarely willing to devote the time and money necessary to make BD live truly shine.
So it ends up being crap filler.
I'm done with physical media. The sooner everything moves to digital distribution the better.
For those of us who appreciate quality and have the ability to display/reproduce it, streaming is a really bad option. All that streaming media (compressed junk) looks horrible and has sound to match.
I hope somehow the speed of accessing data is more server-side related than the software or BR hardware. Because taking 5-10 minutes to get to shitty "Pineapple Express" BD screens is just obnoxious.
The speed is partly due to using JAVA or BD-J, which can take a moment to load.
I agree with Dan -- I'll care about BD Live when it doesn't take the length of the movie to retrieve to content.
A faster server or server farms need $$$ to pay for the big pipe and the hardware. If you think studios somehow are willing to pay for this extra expense for each BD release, you are dead wrong.
totally off topic and i'm not trying to start a flame war but i was just watching the new episode of dirty jobs and there was an ad for lakeview terrace and it said it was now available on blu-ray and hd-dvd... talk about missing the memo....
I am very interested in the very underused ability of BD-Live to add extra subtitles to the film. I want Greek subtitles, which are rarely included with either Region A or B discs. As far as I know BD-live has only once been used for this, on the German version of the Orphanage where German language and German subtitles were offered. Personally I would be happy to pay a couple of Euros, for instance, for a set of subtitles and I know that 3rd party companies could make the content. I would like to think that BD-live discs offer some kind of future proofing, IE one day, even 5 years from now, a multitude of subtitles and alternative languages can be downloaded to work with discs I bought, even last year.... Therefore I want BD-Live to keep growing and become mainstream. Disney are taking it quite seriously BTW. My baby daughter got a laugh or two from Disney BD-Live content.
BD-Live has MASSIVE scope, unfortunately studios are thinking too small and using it for largely irrelevant "features" such as downloading trailers or other nonsense. It would be entirely feasible to use BD-Live to download streaming / download clients, to write apps that show news headlines, weather channels, financial info, games - anything. Imagine for example if that Disney disk let kids play Club Penguin for example, or get 15 days of free shows after registration, or accumlate points for rewards.
Since BD-J is 95% the same as Tru2Way you might even see client apps that run on Tru2Way or BD-J. What would help BD-Live a lot is if a profile 2.1 (for example) defined the manner in which BD-J apps (xlets) could be downloaded and invoked without a disk being inserted. Then you wouldn't need to have Netflix baked into the firmware because the user could just go download it.
dump the movie previews and maybe it'll be more attractive...
Movie previews i can get anywhere...
BD Live is an ill conceived technology that misunderstands what the aim was with HD DVD's "Advanced Content" and replicates the worst aspects of it without doing anything about BD's actual shortcomings vis-a-vis downloadable content.
In theory AC is a great idea. The idea isn't "We'll let you chat to people who are also watching the movie" or "We'll bung a bunch of movies on the web as a special extra", those were simply things you could do as a side effect. The idea was to create an integrated infrastructure that was medium transparent, thus allowing users to buy discs, buy or rent downloads, stream other content, and do this via both offline and online web-style pages.
Unfortunately it was pushed as a feature before the rest of the infrastructure (HD DVD players capable of local storage or disc burning), and so ended up being a collection of nice features that were terribly easy to abuse.
And, somehow, BD Live ended up being a clone of that.
Maybe it's not only BORING content but largely unwanted and unneeded content virtually devoid of real value. Otherwise known as "frills".
Personally I buy/rent a disc when I want to see a movie. I do not think, "Hey, maybe I can also play some crappy games and hear the "Assistant Color Editor's comments".
They have yet to include some of the things they would. Like a downloadable launguage track, or a another subtitle track. Trivia tracks etc.
If at least they took stuff off of the disk to use the space better that would be something. But they just take it off so that you have to get it from the internet for no reason. Just silly right now.
I like Sony trailers etc but Universals streaming trailers are horrible. Although Universals portal looks the nicest.
If you didn't have to register a username for each studio's BD-Live content, I'm sure most people would at least TRY it. I'm an advanced user and never really cared for special features (not many people do) and I get annoyed at having to register plus I get errors occasionally. Like for Disney, it has 3 usernames under my e-mail address from failed attempts. Then I don't think the normal person has a keyboard and mouse that would make registering faster. Sure they could go on their PC but thats really annoying.
Oh and the interfaces are horrible and slow and again with no keyboard, mouse, it can be frustrating. Its not the same thing I don't think but I was using Wanted's U-Control the other day and it was a pain to navigate.