BD-Live falls short again with 'Iron Man'

(Credit: Amazon)

So far, BD-Live has been a pretty questionable feature overall, and last week's Iron Man mishap only makes matters worse. According to High-Def Digest, BD-Live servers were overwhelmed last week, making it impossible for many customers to access the extra content.

The fact that the BD-Live servers were overwhelmed only emphasizes the fact that most BD-Live features could easily be fit on the Blu-ray Disc, instead of having to download them from the Internet. For example, we loaded up Iron Man this morning on the LG BD300, which uses a standard USB memory stick to save the BD-Live content. Afterward, we checked out how much space the BD300 used on the USB stick--only 13.5 MB. According to Blu-ray Statistics, there is over 2.5 GB of free space left on the Iron Man Blu-ray Disc, which means the feature easily could have fit on the disc. Perhaps future BD-Live features will make sense, but as of now, BD-Live seems like it's a gimmick to sell more discs, while actually making it harder for people to access features.

And if you're one of the unfortunate Iron Man buyers that got shut out of the BD-Live features last week, don't feel too bad. What Paramount is calling a "truly state-of-the art Blu-ray presentation" is merely trivia questions about the movie, with a short clip of the movie played behind them. Our experience on the BD300 was that it was frustratingly slow, but even if it was fast, it didn't seem like much fun. While Internet connectivity is needed for some functions, like comparing scores of downloading future question packs, the initial round of questions could be stored on the disc. We're still waiting for a BD-Live feature that's worthwhile.

(Source: High-Def Digest via Gizmodo)

[l3it3r]

What got me was that it took the full three minutes I've seen other BluRay discs claim to load up on the PS3 when the other BDs only take maybe.. what? 10 seconds? I actually thuoght it had locked up the first time and rebooted the PS3

[MadLyb]

I want to watch a movie, not play a video game.

This is simply an artificial convergence created by the Blu-Ray team to better differentiate Blu from HD-DVD and I have no interest in it. In fact, I am motivated to buy players that don't support it to simply to avoid the resulting mess.

[griz_fan]

A couple of thoughts here. First, this shouldn't be a BR vs HD DVD argument. Both formats offered online, interactive content. Also, the problems with the Iron Man disk shouldn't be viewed so much as a problem with BD-Live per se, but rather a problem with how poorly Paramount implemented it. The very fact that it tried to download content before the main menu even loaded shows that people at Paramount really have no clue about interface design. That was simply a dumb decision.

As far as BD-Live is concerned, I see it in the same category as Adobe Flash on websites. Both are great technologies that, in the right hands, can provide something truly creative, fun and interactive. But, in the hands of incompetent hacks, both are at best annoying. How many websites have you seen with crappy Flash animation that only gets in the way of why you visited the website to begin with?