BD Live promising, but has challenges
FUTURE OF PACKAGED MEDIA: Disc developers say Web features future of Blu-ray
By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 2/4/2009
FEB. 4 | LOS ANGELES—BD Live is proving both an indispensable and confounding addition to the Blu-ray Disc production process, according to authoring participants at Tuesday’s Future of Packaged Media conference here.
Zane Vella, president of RCDb, said BD Live, with its Web-connected features, is the future of Blu-ray.
“Blu-ray discs that aren’t network-aware are dead in the water," he said.
Peter Staddon, senior VP at Deluxe Digital Studios, said Web-enabled titles give studios a powerful marketing opportunity.
“It’s a mistake to treat BD Live as a special feature, because it forces you into a narrow definition,” said Staddon. “This should be looked at like an experience across many discs. With BD Live, there is an opportunity to do things that seem trivial but are big for studios. If you take Gladiator and put it into players, its trailers are old and it dates the disc immediately. But in a Blu-ray environment, you can add in Iron Man 2, and that contemporizes it.”
To make the experience more immersive, Staddon said he would like to see developers blend popular online brands such as YouTube and Facebook into BD Live offerings.
However, as promising as BD Live is for the format and studios, its production has brought about challenges for developers.
“Each studio has their own BD Live platform, and where does quality testing fall into that?” asked Adam Lesh, chief technology officer at Testronic Labs. “We can test for BD Live on Sleeping Beauty, but then three months later, the title might be accessing completely new content.”
Developers said BD Live creation adds significant workload to an already squeezed production deadline. Typically, studios want a title’s DVD and Blu-ray versions both completed within three months of the film’s theatrical release, but that's the same length of time developers had when they were focused on DVD only.
According to disc producers, studio executives believe that BD Live's ability to offer fresh content at a later date gives them more time, as special features can be made for the Web after the release of the disc. However, developers say this is a misguided approach to creating compelling features.
“You hear [executives] say that you can just fix it in BD Live,” said Peter Staddon, senior VP at Deluxe Digital Studios. “People might not want to come back after three weeks time" to watch refreshed content.
RCDb's Vella suggests that all Blu-ray titles should include a ‘boot-strap application’ that will automatically check for Web updates every time the discs are played.
“We really have no idea what to do with BD Live or with the Blu-ray format in general yet,” said Vella. “BD Live hasn’t even been available for an entire year yet. … These boot strap applications are a no-brainer.”
