Rough economy challenges Blu-ray?

[Bobby Henderson]

Portable movie viewing has been around for over 20 years now.

Back in the late 1980s my parents bought one of those Sony 8mm videotape portable movie players. It wasn't much bigger than a CD Walkman. And there was a somewhat decent selection of pre-recorded movies you could play on the thing. The device seemed cool for awhile. But the novelty of watching movies on a tiny screen wore off pretty fast. It ended up just taking up some shelf space in a closet.

Portable DVD players have been around for close to a decade. They've never turned into a real hit, even though many have had prices fall to very affordable levels. The only portable DVD player that's really worth a hoot at all is a notebook computer equipped with a DVD burner. Why? The screen usually isn't microscopic.

It is important for music to be portable. Music CD has persisted since it is easy to rip the tracks to a hard disc and convert them to MP3 or AAC format and then load them on a little flash-based player. This was a definite problem for SACD and DVD-A, due to all their anti-piracy issues. Features like BD-Live on Blu-ray could overcome such a thing.

Blu-ray's copy protection system could be used on the high resolution master grade tracks, but then BD Live could allow the disc's owner to freely download lossy MP3 or AAC versions to use on his portable music player. It shouldn't be too difficult to allow a Red Book CD image download as well -perhaps as a lossless compressed file. Blu-ray could deliver audio discs that satisfy any listening purpose. Unfortunately we may never see such a thing happen over the widespread belief that anyone who listens to music only does it via iTunes.