Sony Pictures to smarten up Blu-ray with MovieIQ, the "killer app for BD-Live"
By Richard Lawler 
posted June 18th 2009 7:22PM
posted June 18th 2009 7:22PM
Update: Official press release is included after the break
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Partners with Gracenote To Deliver First Live, In-Movie Film Information with movieIQ
BD-Live™ Enabled Technology to be Featured on Upcoming Blu-ray Disc™ Titles Including Angels & Demons and Easy Rider
BD-Live™ Enabled Technology to be Featured on Upcoming Blu-ray Disc™ Titles Including Angels & Demons and Easy Rider
San Francisco, CA (June 18, 2009) - Sony Pictures Home Entertainment today announced the launch of MovieIQ, a new Blu-ray Disc feature powered by Gracenote® that offers viewers access to a real-time movie database. With a movieIQ-enabled Blu-ray Disc and an internet-connected Blu-ray™ player, movie fans can immediately access continuously-updated information on cast and crew and explore relevant trivia such as production facts, music and soundtrack information all tied to scenes within the movie. SPHE will feature movieIQ on upcoming Blu-ray Disc titles starting in September and will offer it on all major catalog titles and new releases including Angels & Demons, Easy Rider, Punch Drunk Love, The Quick and the Dead, Silverado and sex, lies, and videotape.
"It has always been our goal at Sony Pictures to offer fans the ability to truly connect with their favorite movies using BD-Live," said Lexine Wong, Senior Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. "We know many people interrupt their movie-watching experience to look up the filmography of an actor or to find out more about a song playing in the background. Now through movieIQ, movie lovers can dive into constantly-updated information about the movie they are watching without leaving their sofa, further enhancing the experience of watching movies in this always-connected age."
movieIQ takes advantage of Gracenote's Video Explore solution, which brings powerful search and navigation capabilities to connected consumer electronic devices. Video Explore allows users to search the online Gracenote video database, linking together related cast, crew, movies, TV episodes, franchises, seasons, DVDs, and Blu-rays. Gracenote's global Video database contains rich video information for North America, Europe, and Japan, including factual metadata, synopses, credits, and detailed descriptive elements.
"We are thrilled to be partnering with Sony Pictures to deliver movieIQ, a feature that takes full advantage of the Blu-ray format's internet connectivity and truly demonstrates that Blu-ray is the future of home entertainment," said Ross Blanchard, VP of Business Development at Gracenote. "Now, movie lovers will have access to an incredible new service where they can explore and discover all the rich details on their favorite actors, directors and movies."
The movieIQ feature is the latest addition to SPHE's BD-Live portfolio, which also includes social networking through cinechat, multiplayer games, and a customizable music video editor, as well as soundtrack playlists, e-movie cash, downloadable featurettes, and more, available on over 100 Sony Pictures Blu-ray titles worldwide since the technology launched in spring of 2008.
Well I think this implementation is actually useful to me. PS3 supports this right?
It does.
Guys, if the market *just* cared about the movie, then HD-DVD would've won the format war. Obviously though, the vast majority of the market appears to like gimmicks like this - so you can just shove it.
Ironically, if the format war had started a little later, saaay..... when the economy started to plummet, I could see HD-DVD being much more successful.
HD-DVD had more interactivity earlier, and online from near day one (as opposed to about day 300 from BD). It lost despite having having stuff, far from a ringing endorsement.
BD was more concentrated on the content, with lossless audio considered a near-mandatory option on new releases but a rarity on HD-DVD.
I think it's impossible that HD-DVD could have won, it was not a viable format for the makers of players. Toshiba was giving away over $100 on their players in hopes of making it back on disc royalties. Makers of players could not compete because unlike Toshiba they didn't get disc royalities. So they had two choices, make their players cost over $100 more than Toshiba's (and thus not sell) or give away $100 with their own players with no hope of making it back (doing Toshiba a big favor by putting an HD-DVD player into the market without taking $100 out of the pocket of Toshiba).
Without competition in the player marketplace, you end up with a format where costs of players never really go down and widespread adoption by manufacturers is near-impossible. It's basically the Beta strategy where Sony makes all the decks as opposed to the VHS strategy where Victor got the royalties, but every company under the sun competed to make players.
@ why not the LS2LS7?: Or it could have been the $100s of millions that BR spent in the last month before CES to get guarantees?
Either way, who cares? Besides the economy, the reason DVD and BR sales aren't doing so well is because after years of collecting DVDs that then collect dust, people are waking up to the fact that digital distribution works just as well for the vast majority of movies, which are 'view and forget'.
Don't look at me, I haven't bought any discs since HD-DVD was killed off. Rapidshare FTW.
C'est la REAL digital distribution ;)
Alan:
Toshiba started buying exclusives first. They already were giving financial incentives for Universal to be exclusive, and then they paid Paramount to stop making Blu-rays and go HD-DVD exclusive.
But that is completely beside the point. It wasn't Sony money that decided Toshiba's business plan, and the problem was the HD-DVD business plan made it impossible for any hardware company other than Toshiba to make money off HD-DVD. So unless you think Toshiba is suddenly going to become the #1 consumer product maker, that means HD-DVD cannot win in the marketplace.
As to digital distribution, the movies you can get digitally are only older movies like you can see on HBO. These movies have already made most of the money they are going to make for the studios, which is why they are on HBO (and Netflix streaming) now and $8 on DVD. I do agree that if Hollywood were willing to offer movies on streaming at the same time as on DVD/Blu-ray, streaming would make a huge dent in the marketplace. But so far, Hollywood has shown no interest in this.
@why not the LS2LS7?: "the movies you can get digitally are only older movies like you can see on HBO."
That might have been true a year or more ago, but you can certainly find new releases (and current season TV shows) on Netflix (and I'm sure other digital distributors as well). Saying 'only older movies' suggests you really haven't looked much at what's available digitally.
As for arguing HD-DVD/BR, kind of a moot point, no?
Alan:
Those newer movies you can get are either indies or are offered via the Starz deal. The Starz deal brings the same movies you can see on Starz that month to the Netflix streaming service, but only for as long as they are on Starz (and typically only in SD). The next month, they are gone.
Which why I said what I said. You can get the same movies like you can see on HBO, only I used HBO as an example when I guess I should have been more explicit and used Starz.
TV shows are a different story, the TV companies seem to be far more progressive than the movie studios. Even the difference between NBC Universal and Universal is huge (who actually only share like 40% ownership despite the name). But this still doesn't change what the studios are doing.
This info is tiny enough that it could be on the disk, unless it's actually news, not trivia. It just sounds like an IMDB that needs the net to work even though they know what the queries will be.
Hey, remember when IMDB and CDDB were actually open source projects? Sigh.
LOL! 100% agreed. "We can't fit 200KB of data on the BR, so hook up to the internet and give us your email!"
Consider me nonplussed.
Besides, who give a flying fig about the minutiae of Angels & Demons? A crap movie is a crap movie.
I don't recall those days for either project. CDDB was free in the beginning, but I don't think it was open source. IMDB was run out of the UK by a smaller-time company (than Amazon), and it was easier to get info into it then it is now, but it also wasn't open source. To be honest, IMDB agreeing to follow (self-serving) WGA rules for credits was a bigger impediment to getting info in than anything else.
@ why not the LS2LS7?
IMDb started out as a list maintained on Usenet, and was available as a downloadable database. I even remember having an Amiga that allowed you to search/edit it. It was definitely fan driven before it became the IMDb we all know now.
BD-Live is horsecrap. You need a different account for every studio, activating the features requires a computer (which can do any of these things BD-Live offers better, faster and cheaper) and it all runs slower than molasses.
More like BS-Live.
I want the ability to IM the director/actor and ask them what the hell they were thinking during a particular scene. I am looking at you Michael Bay.
This would truly be the Blu-Ray killer app.
I think it's safe to say "WTF".
Who cares Sony? As long as BRD movies are $35/$40 no one will buy them regardless of the artificial crap features you stuff in just to try and make the extorted prices more appealing.
The idea is nice but honestly I am still now sold on the whole BluRay. Digital Distribution is the way to go if you ask me. The only slight problem is when I get a movie I want to watch the movie not sit down and see who is the actor/actress on screen. Chances are I already know who they are since I am not just going to buy any movie with out knowing who is going to be in it.