Poll: Have you been impressed by BD-Live?

by Richard Lawler posted May 2nd 2009 at 2:30PM

It's been a little over a year since we got our first look at BD-Live in the home, so ow do things look now? That first experience was certainly quite disappointing, but in the intervening year there's been at least a few small steps forward, along with some notable failures. With all the director's chats, promotional networks and the like behind us, and the possibility of video on-demand and live video updates from Star Trek conferences in our present and future, have you seen anything impressive yet, or anything that bodes well for the future of BD-Live?

Filed under: Polls, Blu-ray

Tags: bd live, bd-live, bd-liveinternet, BdLive, blu-ray, blu-ray java, Blu-rayJava, downloads, interactivity, network, special features, SpecialFeatures

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Highest Ranked

kevon27 @ May 2nd 2009 2:57PM

I would like to know how much money was spent on developing BD Live? I have given BD Live a chance in the past but it takes so damn long to load. When it's finally up and running, the experience is absolutely BORING.
BD Live has absolutely no use whatsoever. Without it, we can have bluray movies start to play a 1000 time faster.
The people at the BD association should be flogged with a rubber hose for this crap.

Highest Ranked

DeadPlasmaCell @ May 2nd 2009 3:22PM

Amen.. Wall-E was the first time I bothered to try it out and what a mistake that was.. It took about 20 minutes (from when I actually started timing it) from the time I inserted the movie and got to the BD-Live Menu. By the time it loaded up everyone was frustrated and just wanted to get on with the movie. I guess it's the player?? I have a Sony BDP-s350 and plenty fast Internet, so I dunno.. I've tried it here and there with other movies but it's really just disappointing to have to wait all that time for some trailers and stuff like that.

Neutral

Spanbauer @ May 2nd 2009 3:01PM

My Blu-Ray player isn't Profile 2.0 compatible, so I have not tried any BD Live features.

Highest Ranked

kevon27 @ May 2nd 2009 3:07PM

you're a lucky man,

Neutral

Philip S @ May 2nd 2009 7:02PM

I wonder, if I pull out the 1 gig memory card from my player, will my movies play quicker? Worth a try.

Neutral

kevon27 @ May 2nd 2009 9:07PM

great idea, I'm gonna try the same thing.
Remember in the 60's women burned their Bra's (for women's Liberation). We could start a new movement - (discard the memory card and get rid of BD live)

Neutral

Jason @ May 2nd 2009 3:30PM

Wish I hadn't spent the extra dough last year to get a 2.0 BD player. I could see the appeal if you had teenagers in the home, but the feature seems to have few redeeming values so far for people who are first and foremost interested in watching movies.

Highest Ranked

. @ May 2nd 2009 4:38PM

Go to BD-Live features on a disc, takes forever to load, register using remote control, go to computer to check email and click registration link, enter even more info, then return to player to enter login info. Then you are open to a world of mediocre supplements (that also take forever to load) that were left off the disc for a reason. Don't forget to repeat the registration process for each studio.

BD-Live sucks. Period.

Highest Ranked

Jon @ May 2nd 2009 5:04PM

Quit wasting time and monkey on worthless crap ... Nobody cares you can put early 1990s tech on a Blu ray disc .. we just want high quality video and audio not cheesy web 1.0 games

Highest Ranked

Jon @ May 2nd 2009 5:05PM

haha i said monkey .. money is the word

Highest Ranked

FNG @ May 3rd 2009 9:19AM

I thought bird was the word?

Highest Ranked

Red Dragon @ May 2nd 2009 7:22PM

just get rid of live-bd and give me my resume play feature back!!!

Highly Ranked

WebDev511 @ May 2nd 2009 7:26PM

BD-Live producers/developers STILL hasn't figured out how to make use of it. I have yet to see any that is even close to the connected HDi what hasn't been produced in well over a year. I would have thought that that the studios that were format neutral or came over from HD DVD exclusive would at least have a clue. The closest thing I've seen is the quiz you could take on Iron Man and the live chats on some of the WB titles.

Neutral

fb @ May 2nd 2009 7:40PM

What the studios should do is offer two versions of the movie, one with and one without BD Live, with the version without BD Live being cheaper. The high costs of these movies is crazy, especially since you are forced into paying for features that are useless (ie BD Live).

Highest Ranked

FLskydiver @ May 2nd 2009 11:53PM

BD Live (or is it the Java that it requires) Sucks! I just want to watch the damn movie, and God Forbid I accidentally hit that giant, sensitive "STOP" button on the PS3 remote. Now it's another 10 minutes before I can get back into the disc, through all the forced trailer crap, through the BD-Live loading, and through having to fast-forward back to wherever in the movie I was.

I hate BD Live.

Neutral

JBDragon @ May 3rd 2009 2:06AM

So far BD-LIVE SUCKS!!! It's a boor fest, and SLOW and hell. Waiting around for things to load up and happen, you just want to get out of it. It's nothing like the Features and speed of HDi of the HD DVD format which was far better and much FASTER. I figured they'd take some of those Ideas and go with it on the Blu-Ray format and expand on the Idea's but they haven't. I'm wishing Blu-Ray went with HDi instead of this JAVA junk. Is it to late to switch? No one currently cares for BD-LIVE. Switch to HDi and pretend BD-LIVE(JAVA) never happened.

Highest Ranked

DVD4ME @ May 3rd 2009 5:01AM

Play resumption after pressing stop would be 100 times more valuable!!

Low Ranked

Garst @ May 3rd 2009 5:59AM

I haven't even gone blu yet. Sure, I could try it at someone else's house. But I don't know anyone who has a blu-ray player that has more than a 760k internet connection (it's satellite). BD live isn't likely to ever be used where I live, even by the people who live in town that have cable or DSL that might also happen to have a blu-ray player. I don't think anyone gives a rats ass where I live.

Note how I've demoted blu-ray to a common word. With all the these "great" features that will likely never work here, blu-ray has too many useless features for it to be a proper noun*. And if prices for the discs don't come down soon, I'll completely brush the technology off as a dud.

*the "blu-ray" portion of "blu-ray player" or "blu-ray disc" is technically an adjective and putting "disc" or "player" still only makes it a thing; which only under specially instances, qualfiy it to be proper. And I'm sure more people wouldn't classify "blu-ray" as being as special as the Great Pyramids or the Statue of Liberty. FYI, the Statue of Liberty isn't the name of monument, it's Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, so it would have to be special to have even it's nickname capitalized. Kind of like when you refer to God with a pronoun, even "He" needs to be capitalized.

Wow! I really got off track. But do you know what the real sad part is? You're still reading this! Why haven't you stopped yet? I finished my point three paragraphs ago. Now, you're going to mark this comment down, because I made you look like a fool! Go ahead! Mark me down! Let the world know how many fools can't stop reading a completely pointless rant! HA! HA! HA! HA!

Highest Ranked

TrollSlayer @ May 3rd 2009 3:07PM

Actually I just skimmed it, but it was still very easy to tell that you are a jackass. Well done!

Neutral

YouFaceTheTick @ May 3rd 2009 11:53PM

BD-live serves no purpose. Like all other extras on dvd/BR it's just fluff.

Neutral

shawnmos @ May 4th 2009 2:13AM

Where is the option "My blu-ray player doesn't support BD-Live and I don't care enough to upgrade"?

Highest Ranked

Achilles @ May 4th 2009 10:50AM

It puts BD-Live in the garbage or it gets the hose again................

Neutral

burndive @ May 4th 2009 12:44PM

I haven't tried them because my software Blu-ray player doesn't support them.

Neutral

solodragon @ May 4th 2009 5:25PM

So far the only disc with worthwhile BD Live features was Transformers. I really like the different onscreen options.

Neutral

shizzlemenow @ May 5th 2009 6:14AM

BDLive is more like BD Dead. Who wants to download trailers that take 100 years to download?
Has anyon heard of bd touch? from the site it says that the only way it will work is if studios put code on the movie. Why dont they do that then? I'd kill to control my ps3 with my iphone! Instead we have cheesy web 1.0 games and movies that take forever to get to my movie.

Neutral

bdverse @ May 7th 2009 1:31PM

What kinds of internet-connected features would you be interested in that studios aren't doing yet? For example, assuming that BD-Live is here to stay, at least it should be used for features that make more sense than web-type games. Is it the director's chats? Is it the webcam commentaries?

Neutral

Lex Magic @ May 18th 2009 5:22PM

Hi Ben and Steve,
I was a bit disappointed, that you did not mention in your postcast no. 136, the possibilities of Pay Per View VoD streaming and downloading movies via BD-Live. We have developed some awesome BD-Live widgets that will brighten up the BD-Live technology and usage by end users. Get in contact with me. I am in L.A. (May 26 - 31) and SF (June 1-2).
THX,
Lothar

Neutral

Jason @ Jun 18th 2009 10:59PM

Bring on BD-Touch. To be able to access all of these features on the iphone/Touch while the movie is playing is a great feature.

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