Blu-Ray Blues

It's time to declare Blu-Ray dead.

There was a big announcement yesterday in the Bu-Ray industry: A coalition of companies is forming another company to make licensing for Blu-Ray technology easier. "By establishing a new licensing entity that offers a single license for Blu-ray disc products at attractive rates, I am confident that it will foster the growth of the Blu-ray disc market and serve the interest of all companies participating in this market, be it as licensee or licensor," said Gerald Rosenthal, former head of intellectual property at IBM, who would head the one-stop licensing shop.

And the very nature of this announcement makes it clear why Blu-Ray is already a dead technology: Blu-Ray's customers are the studios and the equipment manufacturers. That's whose interests Blu-Ray was designed to serve. Consumers? Not so much.

When the DVD hit the marketplace, it met a consumer need, so it took off. Its combination of vastly improved video quality, smaller size, ability to jump to scenes without having to fast forward through all the other content, multiple audio tracks, closed captions and subtitles that could be turned on and off, and relative indestructability compared with tape outweighed the initial downside of not permitting an easy way to record to the discs.

The problem with DVDs, as far as the content owners was concerned, was that they didn't offer sufficient Digital Rights Management (DRM). The designers of the DVD standard had relied, pretty much, on security through obscurity and then encryption standards that were bolted on after the fact rather than part of the initial specification. This approach didn't work for CDs, and it didn't really work for DVDs, either. So the goal of the designers of Blu-Ray and DVD-HD was to make something that would have the encryption built right into the medium, be harder to crack, would make it harder for users to copy, use, and make mash-ups of the content on the discs they buy. All you can do is watch it as intended.

But why should users make the leap--especially in the midst of a recession? Those who are prone to collect copies of video programs they like already have a substantial collection of DVDs they don't want to replace or see made obsolete. And if you go to your local Best Buy or Fry's and compare a nice HDTV of the size you'd have in your living room and compare the image produced by a good upsampling DVD player with that of a Blu-Ray player, you will notice some difference in quality--but your socks will definitely remain safely and snugly on your feet.

There are no additional consumer features for Blu-Ray beyond slightly better rpicture quality. The discs are the same size. Menus act pretty much as they did for DVD. You still can't skip the FBI warning at the beginning of the disc, even though you surely have it memorized.

Do you remember DAT--short for Digital Audio Tape? It came out right around the time of the CD as the recording medium that the industry wanted you to buy. It had all the DRM controls the industry wanted, but less flexibility for users than the good old audio cassette or the MP3 format that soon followed. All that it offered over the cassette and MP3 was somewhat better asudio quality. And the industry sold...hundreds of them.

Welcome to Blu-Ray--the video DAT of the 2000s.