By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

Created: October 28, 2008

Physical media such as CD-ROMs and DVDs have long been plagued with the problem of age. Once these disks were manufactured (pressed), the content on them remain static. For DVD movies this static content “feature” was acceptable to consumers as DVDs offered them a time tested way to enjoy their favorite programs virtually indefinitely. However, beyond the original title saved on DVDs, some of the other content on these disks (such as reviews or previews) quickly becomes dated. Last year’s winner of the high definition disk format battle, Blu-ray Disk (BD) has made recent strides to solve this aging problem with a technology it calls BD-Live.

BD technology is finally making strides in popularity. The industry believes that by Thanksgiving of this year we’ll see the first $150 BD player which should also impact BD title sales - industry estimates suggest nearly $1 billion worth of BDs in 2008, that’s 588% increase over 2007 sales. Consumers purchasing these newer players will notice they all come with an Ethernet port, an increasing number of players come with Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) support, and some even come with streaming players (e.g. Samsung’s BD-P2500 can stream movies from Netflix). While Ethernet is a feature of previous BD players, newer players offer BD-Live (also known as BD Profile 2.0) which support downloadable complimentary content via the Internet available on a currently small but growing list of BD-Live movie titles.

BD-Live is an example of taking a static (less than exciting) technology like the playback of video discs using a low end consumer electronics device, and turning this experience into something more dynamic. Some of the initial drivers for BD-Live include the ability offer:

• Collaborative Viewing – Demonstrated by Disney’s release of Sleeping Beauty where viewers can watch the movie in tandem with friends in other locations and chat using a laptop, PDA, or cell phone where comments appear on the screen.
• Interactive Gaming – Demonstrated with Sony’s release of Men in Black which includes a trivia challenge game which is playable across a network.
• Annotated Video – Demonstrated by Disney’s release of Sleeping Beauty where parents can record a video message that will pop up during a designated scene as another person (e.g. child) watches.
• Audio Sharing – Demonstrated by Sony at CES 2008 which includes the ability to send ringtones or specific audio excerpts from a BD player to mobile phones to allow users to further personalize their operation.
• Dynamic Content Insertion – Not yet demonstrated, but in theory, studios could ultimately stream their latest previews down to different genres of BD titles allowing them to advertise new releases either coming to theaters or already in theaters.

In these cases, the Internet can round out the available content and features of BDs nicely, perhaps to the point where the disc merely becomes a storage vehicle for the high bandwidth content while BD-Live feature allows the disc to point to much more exciting downloadable content that lights up once the disc is loaded.

Technically, BD-Live leverages Blu-ray’s mandatory scripting support (BD-J and BD-Java) used to drive interactive menus on Blu-ray discs along with an Internet connection to obtain updates which can add features and additional menu content not included on the disc at pressing time. Interestingly, BD-J is a subset of Globally Executable MHP (GEM) which is the foundation on which the cable industry’s Open Cable Application Platform (OCAP), which is now called Tru2way, is based.

With the similarities between BD and Tru2way, it seems conceivable that future DVRs or possibly even Set Top Boxes (STB)s will be able to save content (with imbedded BD-Live or equivalent content) to blank Blu-ray discs for personal uses. Such discs could contain features like targeted advertising avails along with previously recorded ads for instances where the BD player isn’t connected to the Internet. It also seems conceivable that due to this fairly broad consensus around using GEM among interactive video options, that recent hold outs like Verizon will adopt something that is also based on GEM and will be in some way compatible with BD-Live for cases when users want to save their recorded content on a BD.

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