Now with HD DVD out of the picture, the Blu-ray camp is free to promote the format’s cutting edge technology, no matter how dull that edge may be. USA Today has a puff piece today on Blu-ray’s upcoming Profile 2.0, known colloquially as BD-Live. The new standard, which is scheduled to debut this fall, requires that Blu-ray players have built-in Internet connectivity capability, something all HD DVD players had at launch in 2006.
No, you won’t need a BD-Live player to watch Blu-ray movies, but you will need one to enjoy several new features. Movie studios are loading future BD-Live-compatable discs with things like MoLogs, which stands for movie blog, where movie fans can share audio and video with each other as the movie plays. (Who would want to do that, and why?)
Other more benign features include trailer downloads and extra language tracks. Didn’t the HD DVD version of 300 do that? But Blu-ray’s superior… Apparently free ringtones could also be part of the deal, but unless they expect people to network their Blu-ray player to their computer then send tones from said computer to their phone—not at all for the consumer electronics novice—it’s seems like a stretch.
Yup, having one high-def disc format is much better for everyone. I’m not saying the format war was a good thing, but now Sony et al. can sit back and claim they’re innovating when, you know, they’re really not.
New features coming for Blu-ray DVD format [USA Today/Yahoo!]
This has been planned since, like, the beginning of Blu-ray. Sony’s only mistake is not making BD 2.0, 1.0.
Ahhh, that headline on the paper should read “HD-DVD Defeats Blu-ray” the whole thing with the paper was that Truman actually defeated Dewey, and the paper printed the results too early.
http://www.historybuff.com/library/reftruman.html
Pertaining to this article though, like Matt said, this was all part of Blu-ray all along. The issue was they had far more manufactures then HD-DVD and therefore it took longer fro them to work out the specs on how they wanted it implemented.
What are they going to do with the remaining HD-DVD players? Oh wait… I know… Sell them on Pricesmart in LatinAmerica for around 250 a piece. And i have the pic!
If i was Toshiba i would have reoriented it towards backup (It still is a pretty alternative to DVD on any pc, htpc or dvr).
Blu ray still has a long way to go be fore it is ready for prime time, perhaps in a few years it will be worth looking at, if it survives that long.
Might be better to just wait this format out …