BD-Live can kiss my butt

I’m sorry, but the more Blu-ray-peddlers bang on about BD-Live, the more the whole damn ‘feature’ pisses me off. Honestly, just about everything about it winds me up.

I promise I’m not just saying this to be controversial or sound like a ‘professional cynic’, either. I’ve even tried at times to fight the irritation that marketing fluff about BD-Live invariably provokes in me, as the last thing I want is to sound like a permanent whinger. Plus I really want Blu-ray to succeed as a format now that poor old HD DVD has sailed into the sunset.

But in the end there’s just no getting round the fact that as it stands right now, the Blu-ray camp’s pride in BD-Live would be laughable if it wasn’t so annoying.

For starters, every time another AV manufacturer (like Panasonic at a big product launch this week for its new Blu-ray products at Abbey Road Studios) or film studio with a vested interest in Blu-ray starts waxing lyrical about the ‘amazing interactive features’ BD-Live makes possible, I just can’t stop feeling that actually – from what’s been shown so far, at least - BD-Live is showing no signs of offering anything at all that wasn’t already possible on HD DVD players from the now-dead format’s launch.

So for the Blu-ray camp to pass the BD-Live technology off as a brave new home entertainment frontier so brazenly when they’re actually just rehashing an earlier technology really sticks in my craw.

All it would take to make me feel better about the situation is for one or two Blu-ray advocates to be honest and simply come out and say that the new feature finally brings Blu-ray up to the specification level it should have had from the start. Hell, even a self-effacing or wry joke would do. But no; all I ever hear time after time is another painfully earnest attempt to make BD-Live sound like the life-changing, revolutionary new feature it so clearly isn’t.

Which brings me to the second big reason why BD-Live winds me up: its apparent rubbishness.

Admittedly it’s early days for the system so far (it certainly doesn’t seem nearly as developed as HD DVD's online system was by the time the format crumbled!), but so far all I’ve seen of BD-Live in action are annoying clips of online chatrooms, video messaging services nobody will ever use, and entirely pointless ‘Mologs’ – kind of blogs to which anyone who owns a film can contribute.

And I haven’t even mentioned yet the oft-talked about potential for BD-Live discs to download new trailers for upcoming films, sponsorship logos and other insidious marketing tools. Oh, goody goody.

I’m not meaning to imply here that it’s impossible for BD-Live to deliver some passably interesting bits and bobs in the future. But I’d be surprised – nay, shocked – if even the best BD-Live features of the future turn out to be any more than the very lightest and least worthwhile features on a disc.

What perhaps gets my goat about BD-Live more than anything else, though, is the fact that some quarters of the Blu-ray camp actually seem to want to make it a ‘premium feature’ only available – for now at least – on step-up Blu-ray players. This approach sucks on so many different levels it’s frightening.

For starters, it propagates unnecessary confusion in the Blu-ray marketplace. After all, how are people who’ve bought a cheap, non-BD-Live Blu-ray player going to feel when they suddenly find that they can’t actually use some of the features found on the latest Blu-ray discs they’ve bought?

It’s one thing having step-up features on Blu-ray players that, say, improve picture or sound quality, but quite another to remove from entry-level players a feature necessary to enjoy everything source software has to offer. The last thing Blu-ray needs as a format right now is consumers getting ‘you cannot access this feature’-type messages popping up when they explore the extra features on a disc.

This is especially the case given that we’ve already had a format, HD DVD, that offered BD-Live-style functionality AS STANDARD, on any HD DVD player at whatever price. Just because you’ve won a format war doesn’t mean you can simply change the rules to the detriment of the consumer without expecting people in the know to be seriously cheesed off about it.

Making BD-Live a premium player feature also undermines the whole idea of having premium players at all if you ask me. After all, premium players are supposed to offer significant performance or feature benefits. Yet as we’ve already seen, BD-Live on current evidence doesn’t appear likely to add anything of real significance to the user experience, and so can’t justify anyone having to spend an extra penny to get it.

My suspicion is that the whole idea of presenting BD-Live as a premium feature has actually come about as a result of the BD camp wanting to hide the slowness of its development process - or more specifically, the fact that it’s only just managed to deliver a truly finalised format.

After all, if the Blu-ray camp simply suddenly announced that its BD-Live system was now a standard Blu-ray feature, it could, in my (non-legalese!) opinion, potentially allow anyone who’d bought a Blu-ray player prior to BD-Live’s appearance to claim that they had been sold an incomplete product.

In the end, given BD-Live’s apparent triviality as a feature, I guess you could say I’m getting all worked up about nothing here. But the fact is that it’s not actually me who’s trying to make a big deal out of BD-Live, it’s the Blu-ray people. And the more they try to do this without the slightest hint of irony or embarrassment, the more they simply make themselves look both silly and, rather disturbingly, desperate…