Roughly Drafted's take on Blu-ray victory

[Neo65]

This is the line that most piqued my interest :

Through 2005, Toshiba continued to struggle with HD-DVD. The components required to to render HD video and display Microsoft’s HDi were similar to a low-end PC, and cost roughly $675 just for the bill of materials. That left Toshiba with a major hardware loss when trying to sell the players at a $500 consumer price target. The company was ready to drop HD-DVD that year and join the Blu-Ray consortium, but Microsoft pushed it to continue.

If we think about how successful the perception of HDi 'superiority' over BD-J was supposed to be, you have to realize the HDi people did a valiant job of twisting facts and major obfuscation that had even supposed experts baffled.

We do know that HD-A1 launched with a P4, the HD-A2 with a 900MHz celeron. The BD players typically had SOCs with 300-400MHz MIPS-like riscs or external ARM like RISCs, in all cases, tiny processors that are < 1/4 the speed of a 900MHz celeron (without even considering MMX or the simd extensions!).

Yet so many believed that BD-J was much more resource hungry than HDi when the exact opposite was true. The reality is actually that HDi is a bloated processor hungry beast that is typical of binaries coming out of redmond, and yet they managed to twist things around to let people believe the exact opposite.

Of course, JAVA is no saint either when it comes to being a processor hog, but between native byte code vs interpreted javascript, even PC neophytes easily understand which takes more processor power to run.

In the end, I think the whole HDi/BD-J thing is an interesting exercise in improving the value of HDM, but unfortunately, the facts appear to be clear that the current crop of buyers into HDM really don't find that stuff THAT interesting. Which is unfortunate for the people working on them.

My suggestion is that if there really is room for the interactivity in blu-ray, the people who want to push this better think it through very carefully and come up with something compelling. Right now, every single execution of the interactive concepts from spinning coins/skulls/space-invaders/painted-cars have been rather uninspiring.

The problem with overpromising something with superlative adjectives is that it build up expectations, and when the reality of what people are seeing is even less than their pre-hype thoughts on this, the disappointment will kill interactivity even faster. After a while, it will become the butt of jokes. And lets face it, we're probaby a hair line away from that point right now.

So, if people want this interactivity thing to be successful the engineers working on presenting interactivity with BD-J have to come up with something really compelling --- something shocking enough that people will give internet / interactivity another chance. My belief is that they can't use the PC as a template --- there is no keyboard on the BD player, there is only a remote, so there is no exact precedent on how best to present an interactive experience since the most successful model --- the PC won't work here.