Is BD-Live even necessary?

We've never been completely sold on BD-Live as a major selling point for Blu-ray. While special features on DVDs are certainly nice, the vast majority of people don't have the interest or time to watch more than the main movie. Blu-ray movies also have special feature sections, plus some movies have even more features available via BD-Live, which you can access with an Internet-connected Profile 2.0 player. While there are certainly plenty of cinephiles that want to watch every deleted scene and featurette available, we doubt it will be forcing many people to upgrade from DVD.

(Credit: Amazon)

While it's easy to consider BD-Live a relatively unexciting extra feature of Blu-ray, we have started to see some potential downsides. For example, early this week High-Def Digest reported that the Transformers Blu-ray now has new BD-Live content available. Transformers on Blu-ray came out in September, so we doubt that the new short "Robot Ninjas" was created over the last month--more likely it was held onto to continue to generate interest in the movie.

On one hand, it's good that content makers continue to add content, but on the other hand you could say, why wasn't this available on the disc in the first place? We headed over to Blu-ray Statistics to see if Transformers possibly took up an entire 50GB Blu-ray Disc, but it only takes up 45.75GB--surely there's enough room to fit an extra short. That's not the only example. Walk Hard also has a couple extra shorts available via BD-Live, and that disc takes up 46.87GB. From what we've seen, we're pretty sure the extra content could fit on the Blu-ray Disc if they wanted to. The movie already includes an extra Blu-ray Disc for special features, and we doubt the extra content fills up that much space.

In a lot of ways, BD-Live reminds us of Senior Editor David Katzmaier's discussion about online HDTV firmware updates. While it's great that companies can add functionality after a product is released, it also makes it easier to ship unfinished products. In a perfect world, we'd like to see standard special features on the actual disc--so that people without Internet-enabled Blu-ray players can watch them--and keep BD-Live to content that truly need to be served over the Web. In fact, BD-Live could actually be pretty cool if it's used to serve up timely content, such as clips of the film winning an award or perhaps recent news about the actors. But as it stands now, it seems like more of a gimmick than a feature.

What do you think? Will BD-Live eventually become a killer feature for Blu-ray? Or will disc makers just use it as a gimmick and make it more difficult to view special features?

[kswa1987]

personally i think bd-live is worthless, i just want to watch HD movies!

[DJ_Lae]

Gimmick. It was a gimmick back when HD-DVD touted it as one of its advantages over Blu-ray, and it's a gimmick now that Sony and the rest of them have rolled it up (which at the time was no doubt to bring it in line with HD-DVD, but hey). Extra features I can just as well watch on Youtube? Online polls? Reordering movie scenes and sharing them with people? Great, those are just what I want.

I understand that Blu-ray is having a tough time distinguishing itself from DVD (really, all it has is an increase in picture/sound quality) but most people are going to need compelling reasons. Including digital copies of movies with a Blu-ray is a good way to lure people from the DVD version. Useless online features is not.

[mmntech]

As useless as RIAA's Ringle. What ever happened to that? I've personally never used the BD-Live feature. Flash based movie games? I can just play proper games on my PS3. I think what Hollywood was searching for when then developed BD-Live was something to set Blu-ray apart from DVD (same goes with HD-DVD's online features). Most people really don't see that much difference between the two formats when upscaling is brought into the picture. They don't see much of a reason to invest $400 in new hardware for such small gains. VHS to DVD represented a quantum leap in the way we watched movies. DVD to BD not so much. Your average Joe is perfectly content with 128kb/s MP3s, why would video be any different.

[MickBurke]

Well said. Actually I had always assumed that was what BD Live was for, delivering interactive or 'timely' features, not old stuff that is suddenly cool because you had to download it; "The kids are crazy about downloading stuff!"

[limeythree]

I think BD-Live has the potential to bridge the home theater and the web in a groundbreaking way.

Agreed that none of the current download features have any value at all, but from a developer's perspective: 50Gs worth of HD video combined with a flexible Java run-time environment and socket level TCP-IP support is very promising.

And at $200 this X-mas the platform will be everywhere fast...

With time and more experience the studios will move away from bogus downloads and will start integrating BD-Live into web content and services at a API level. Think personalized special features, community experiences around movies, and Blu-ray discs as a high-def front end to ongoing stories and franchises.

[Dave_BluRayStats]

BD Live has many capabilities - the number of useful ones is perhaps limited.

The kinds of features that would be cool include:

Video from events after disc release (Starship Troopers 3 is a good example)

Live feeds of information pertinent to the movie (Blood Diamond did this for HD DVD)

Updated Trailers - though there are many sources for these.

I think it will take a while before the studios sort out what can be done and what will be useful to the consumer. On the plus side, they can log traffic so they will get solid feedback on what works and what is a waste of time and effort.

[chadmcneeley]

I often marvel at the impatience with this type of new technology and the naysayers. And it always seems like everyone wants it all and they want it all now. It is what it is, now, but imagine what can it become and quickly.
Patience is a virtue. Its going to be something great and special. Hollywood just needs to commit to it, and they will.