Sony beefs up Blu-ray strategy

Erica Ogg | Jun 19, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO--Even as Blu-ray Disc and Blu-ray player sales are growing, Sony is looking to build out its larger strategy surrounding the company's high-definition disc products.

At a small press event recently, the company introduced a new feature of BD-Live and a new piece of Blu-ray hardware.

MovieIQ will be included on some high-profile releases from Sony starting in September. It's essentially IMDb live--while a movie is playing, facts about casting, directors, production, and actors' filmographies pop up onscreen. It's powered not by IMDb, but by Gracenote, creators of CDDB, which Sony purchased just over a year ago.

It's the kind of feature intended to keep people from pausing a movie and hopping online to ask questions like, "I totally recognize that actress, but from what movie?" It's also meant to build on the inherent capability of Blu-ray players that have Internet access. Sony has tried to do this by allowing BD-Live access to exclusive trailers and some trivia games, but MovieIQ seems like something that users would engage with repeatedly, not something they'd just use once and forget about.

A senior Sony exec at the event, Tracy Garvey, called MovieIQ the "first killer-app for BD-Live." That sounded like an admission that none of the BD-Live features thus far have been all that compelling.

It's clear Sony is still in the process of fine-tuning its BD-Live strategy. At the event, Sony Vice President Rich Marty said that while 37 million Blu-ray Discs were sold in 2008, the company has only released about 100 titles that are BD-Live enabled. In other words they still have a long way to go.

"BD-Live is complementary to Blu-ray," he said Thursday. "It was never meant to compete with the Web, it's not a VOD (video on demand) play. We're still building the foundation."

Part of building that foundation is bringing down the cost of Blu-ray players. While the PlayStation 3 is still generally regarded as the best deal on a Blu-ray player from a top-tier electronics company, other brands sell players for as low as S$499 (US$358.81) these days. But Sony is also pushing Blu-ray drives in notebooks. While Dell, Sony, Acer, and Asus have dutifully jumped in offering the drives, Sony says the prices are still too high.

Via CNET.com

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