Sony, Philips, Panasonic to create single Blu-ray license

Companies that wish to make Blu-ray devices will very soon have a less expensive and simpler licensing process, according to a joint announcement Wednesday from Sony, Philips, and Panasonic.

A new license will be established by mid-2009 as a "one-stop shop" for device makers. The license will include all necessary Blu-ray, DVD, and CD patents for selling Blu-ray players. The licensing program will be handled by a new licensing company to be led by Gerald Rosenthal, former head of intellectual property at IBM. It will be based in the U.S., but will have local branches in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

Instead of having to approach Blu-ray, DVD, and CD holders individually and paying them separate royalties, the single license should cut down the total cost of royalty payments by 40 percent, according to Sony.

The fees for the new licenses will be $9.50 for a Blu-ray player, and $14 for a Blu-ray recorder. Making Blu-ray Disc will cost 11 cents for read-only, 12 cents for recordable discs, and 15 cents for rewritable discs.

The idea for a one-stop shop for Blu-ray has been floating around since a 2007 meeting of the 18 companies that hold Blu-ray patents. Licensing fees can be extremely lucrative for disc format patent holders: several years ago license fees for making a DVD player cost between $15 and $20.

This one-stop shop will help avoid the headache DVD licenses created. To make a DVD player or disc, manufacturers have had to ink deals with three separate organizations that represented various patent holders. There is DVD 6c (Hitachi, Panasonic, JVC, and six others); DVD 3c (Philips, Sony, Pioneer); and MPEG LA (representing encoders and decoders).

Former CNET News editor Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.

[holywarrior007]

Thats great. I hope Apple will ship MBs and MBPs with Blu-ray player in near future.

[tauvix]

The problem with Blu-ray drives in laptops is that it dramatically reduces battery life. I believe it's gotten a bit better recently, but when Dell first started offering Blu-ray drives, two otherwise identical machines with the only difference being a DVD-RW drive vs. a Blu-ray drive ended up with the Blu-ray enabled system having a battery life of a little less then half of the DVD-RW enabled system.

[Seaspray0]

Why wait. The PC's already have them.

[punterjoe]

Why does it matter? It's too little too late. Solid State media will own the recordable market & commercial content will be delivered by the net. Stick a fork in it Sony. It's done.

[J-Hawaii]

You wish. I downloaded the HD version of the pilot episode for Fringe the other night. 2.64 GB file took 4 hours to download from iTunes, and it wasn't near the quality of a BD. I'm not going to pay +$40/month for faster broadband than I already have. Guess I'll stick to my $1 extra Netflix account for blu-ray.

[Hunnter2k3]

No, just no.
Solid-state is still an order of magnitude higher in price than Optical when you get to large sizes / quantities.
I don't think solid-state will take over from Blu-ray until at least 2015, and i'm probably being generous there, sadly.

HVDs are still pricey too, as well as the other exotic methods of optical storage.

And Digital Downloads, as good as they are for some, won't take off for years after.
The internet is a massive mess as it is, "blackholes" all around the place, terribly bad bandwidth restrictions ("oh hey, here, have an 8Mbit line, but you have a 1gig bandwidth limit, give us money now"), and the whole DRM nonsense too.

[Mike+1]

This is long overdue news! It will help Sony sell their Playstation 3 and other Blu-ray players if the media is more reasonably priced. There will continue to be a market for portable media (ie, blu-ray discs) for a number of reasons. While I agree that solid state media (ie, hard drives) will be the way to go for many, not everyone can or will even want to download everything from the internet and have somewhat limited playback ability such as not being able to play a movie in a portable dvd player or take a movie to a friend's house to watch or send a movie with the kids to grandma's house where there are no internet connected devices.

[supergoodnachos]

Unless this leads to a meaningful decrease in Blu-Ray media prices, I don't see it helping much. Its not like licensing is the reason players are $200+. Wake up Blu-Ray, the disks cost too much.

[SLYS]

Why is everyone rushing to wanting downloads to replace physical media? I'm not in favor by a long shot. Here's why:
1) When I hold the physical media in my hands I know I own it. There's no debate like there is with an electronic fileset; i.e. did I pirate that fileset from someone else?
2) And some of you may say, well, there's DRM. You can't play it unless you are DRM covered. Guys, we can't have it both ways. The mass of folks is pushing for DRM free content due to all its limitations and problems and now you're going to hold that up as the standard litmus test of true ownership for my e-fileset/rip? Right...
3) I can resell/trade physical media. How are we going to do that with e-files? That's such a commerce pain when it comes to reaching the less tech savvy folks out there.
4) E-files have to be kept up with, backed up to protect the investment, and typically require a LOT of storage space. No, don't think that I want to relay on Internet weather and re-downloading a movie that I've already purchased each time my wife and I get a whim to sit on the couch and watch a movie. Yeah, that will go over like a lead balloon with her.
5) And from the sheer enjoyment of it, it's really cool to see my 550+ DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray media packages in my entertainment center waiting to be played. Imagine trying to sell someone a collection of 550 e-packages. I can hear it now; "Yeah, right. You're trying to convince me that you actually bought all those?"

[da_bombdiggidy]

SLYS, I hear what you are saying and currently I feel the same way but ultimately this needs to change fast. Physical will always have limitations. They are getting better but they all suffer maximum viewing issues. DVD's will not play forever and can be damaged easily. In both cases, you no longer own the content rather a physical piece of trash. Your point about selling your movies is odd to me so I won't touch it. NM, why buy it if you are going to sell it? Your losing money because you opened the package regardless the content is the same? Honestly, I rather an electronically stored list than paying for more cabinet space for movies. Imagine doubling your collection without losing space in your home. Also, if you own digital rights, we could force the disitributors to make that content look great on any device at any time be it your phone, TV, alarm clock.....where ever you are at.

[ahandal]

The problem here is that the license scheme does not include all the patents existing that apply to this technology standard. There are a number of other patent holders, including MPEG LA and others such as Hitachi, Toshiba etc, that will jump in to asset IP rights down the road. The licensing pool is not complete and therefore just another example of big companies selling a bill of goods.