The Future Of Blu-Ray: Live Lookup, iPod Connectivity, No More Load Times, And More
By Brendon Connelly/Sept. 30, 2009 12:10 pm EST
I think Digital Copy could also be an interesting area where, for example, we’re able to push content from the disc using the network connection of the device to your secondary device and again give the consumer better access to the content.
Say Goodbye To Boring Loading Times
So that’s all pretty exciting, particularly for nerds like me. But maybe you just want your Blu-Ray player for the basic movie experience and don’t care about accessing trivia tracks on your iPhone? McCrossan and Co. are also working on ironing out a couple of annoying wrinkles in the fundamentals of the format. Thankfully, we’ll soon be able to wave goodbye to those long loading times:
We think that’s a really important feature for the format so that’s something we’ve been working on for quite a while and I’m actually expecting its something that could be available in the near future.
One of the things we’ve actually been working on for some time now is how to improve the fundamentals of Blu-Ray. What can we do to actually improve the basic experience that a consumer gets when they put a Blu-Ray disc into the player to watch a movie? One of the things that we have been looking at is how can we reduce the load time?
We’ve actually been looking at a project that will do away with that altogether and so that when you put the disc in and you’re watching some cards and you’re watching some trailers, in the background we’re doing all of the set up, we’re doing all of the loading, getting the disc ready to play the movie. This will dramatically decrease the time that many consumers experience when they put the disc in.
Saving To Your Player
Another basic update is the recreation of the facility we know from DVD, where the player will remember where in a movie you are if you have to remove the disc for any reason. Of course, it’s going to go a little further on Blu-Ray:
And so, again, from a research standpoint we been working on some features that again I think you guys will see in the near future where when someone ejects the disc we’ll make sure that all of the stuff that you’ve done with that disc up to that point is saved, whether that’s playing a game, creating your own bookmarks even where you are in a movie, all of that will be saved so that the next time you put the disc in again very quickly you’ll have a screen option exactly where you left off and the option to resume.
One of the things that we have been looking at is how can we let the consumer go back to the disc after they’ve played it once and re-engage where they left off. This was one of the things that we had on DVD where if you ejected a disc many of the players offered a feature that enabled you to resume playback. Unfortunately, with Blu-Ray its much more difficult for a player to do that but on the content side, leveraging the capabilities of the format, that’s actually something we can do.
3D Blu-Ray
I’m hoping to see the other studios step up to the challenge and try to outdo McCrossan and team. I want to see the format benefit from some seriously ferocious competition. Surely Sony have the inside track here and can come roaring up with some exciting prospects of their own?
