Blu Branding

When you have a product that is as clearly superior as Blu-ray and which has a clear USP – HD Video, lossless audio, Web connectivity and so on – why on earth would you allow the marketing department to undercut the product profile by using the 'Blu' prefix for a marginally better way of writing data for a disc format that is over twenty-five years old?

Launched by Sony in Japan on December 24th, 'Blu spec CDs' can be played in existing CD and DVD players; which is hardly surprising, since the replicated discs are no different from any other CD made since 1982. The Red Book audio standard is the bible of CD production, defining exactly how the disc should be read by the laser in the CD player and nothing changes with the new (more expensive) discs. The fact that a blue laser is used to burn 'higher definition' pits is of absolutely no concern to the consumer, apart from the fact that the 'Blu' CDs are 20-25% more expensive. Instead of spending more on the discs, audiophiles would be better off saving the premium to pay for improved speakers, amps and drives, which in most cases would lead to noticeably improved sound quality for every disc in their collection.

Blu-ray players offer a unique way to experience higher quality sound and vision in the home. Whatever the engineering challenges that Blu-spec CDs have been able to resolve, the techies should never have been allowed to stick a Blu label on what is still a red laser product.

* According to research on the Christmas 2008 CE market, carried out by LG Electronics, 74% of consumers are still confused about Blu-ray. LG polled 1,000 people over the age of 16 in the UK.

When better compression comes along

It seems that Pioneer has mastered the 16-layer Blu-ray and we'll soon have 400GB discs on which to store our HD movies, with maybe a Terabyte to come. (dvd-intelligence). It's just what the market has been waiting for, particularly since those friendly Holographic folk in Longmont seem to have dropped the ball (several times). But do we really need more space?

Whenever you talk to lovers of IPTV and other internet-delivered wonders, the mantra is always the same: "Sure, we're having a job squeezing 1080p into 2Mbits right now but you've got to understand that compression technology is getting better all the time. By the time we roll out our service there'll be no problem." Next stop Super Hi-Vision on dial-up?

I was there when fractal video was the answer to video on CD, when the audience applauded Star Trek on CD-i, when VoD was going to replace DVD "by the end of the century". At nearly every step the compression algorithms were directly related to the bandwidth and storage space available. Isn't it time we separated the needs of the Video Home Entertainment market from the demands of IT?

Let's face it, Blu-ray audio and video is 'good enough' for the consumer demands of today and tomorrow (and probably the day after that) and the 50GB of a dual-layer disc is more than enough for most entertainment applications. Good though some modern compression methods may be, it will be a long while before the current crop of codecs are superseded. More people are more concerned about locking down the profile version and dealing with AACS than adding extra capacity.

Where does that leave 16-layer technology if not in the hands of the Hollywood Studios? Innovation is a wonderful thing but committing several hundred Gigabytes of precious data to a single plastic disc seems as crazy as losing a laptop with the records of 25 million people on it. And anyway,when the new data compression strategy comes along, I'll be able to put it all on a USB Key.