Finally, I think we’ve found a use for BD-Live that won’t just fade away like a stupid quiz or a georestricted, one-time-only commentary from the film’s director. 20th Century Fox have announced that anyone who owns the vanilla version of Avatar on Blu-ray will get access to some of the exclusive material being released with the extended edition of the film hitting stores on November 24. For free.
This bit of Blu-Ray news was left suspiciously out of Sony’s CES keynotes and big reveals, which doesn’t bode well… but anyway. Now it’s out: The BD Live feature MovieIQ Sync debuted with Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Woo?
So there have been quite a few of these Blu-ray community screenings over the past year or so, but they’ve all been restricted to viewers in the US. The latest Harry Potter flick however, the Half Blood Prince, is having a community screening that’s global. That means you can actually take part, and chat with both Daniel Radcliffe and director David Yates while you watch the movie (or something like that anyway).
What’s the sweet spot for an entry level Blu-ray player? $150? $200? $599? We’re going to say that it’s definitely not the latter…
Truth be told, we didn’t expect that the BD-Live screening of Watchmen hosted by director Zack Snyder would ever make it here to Australia. But we’ve had confirmation from Paramount that we definitely won’t get to sit back and chat with Snyder during the community screening US owners of the Blu-ray will experience.
Warner Bros is super, super smart about marketing their Blu-ray discs. First they had Christopher Nolan host a community screening for The Dark Knight. Now director Zack Snyder will do the same for Watchmen.
From September, all new Sony Pictures Blu-ray discs will support MovieIQ, a service which grabs IMDB-esque data from the Internet to show during playback. How BD-Live hadn’t already been used to do something like this, I have no idea.
Sony is said to be releasing their previously-spied 400-disc ES Series Blu-ray “Ultra Player” soon, meaning that even the most well-heeled home theatre enthusiasts will have a big enough changer for their expansive movie collections.
