Universal Studios was the last major studio to support BD-LIVE up until the year 2021

[Eidolon]

Originally Posted by Shane Rollins

I remember in the old days I saw an ad that said I could meet the cast and crew of Harry Potter over BD-Live. When I finally got the ability to do BD-Live, it was a giant ad. They knew how to screw a gullible kid. The only release I have that has it off the top of my head is Heavy Metal, but I think the old Digibook of A Clockwork Orange has it too. That BD-Live might even have the 40 minutes of deleted scenes on it.

Just ****ing with you. It’s the same ads as every other BD-Live feature. Aren’t I cute?

I’ll see what happens with my BD-Live discs.

The Harry Potter thing was a one-off live COmmentary. You could log in on a computer at the same time, and send them questions, and they'd choose which ones they wanted to answer. It was a rather interesting event, especially how your BD's playback was controlled from their end. They went for a toilet break half way through, and paused all the BDs that were playing as part of the event.

The UK Rambo BD had menus that altered depending on what was on BD LIve, which was amazing to me at the time.

I miss BD live. There was some really good stuff on it, such as the Star TRek orginal series, T2, Trick r Treat. Good things now long gone.
Disney always blocked those of us outside the USA from thier BD Live though, which really peeved me off.
I'm surprised companies don't use it to allow access to a weblink or maybe store, showing their releases. Seems like an easy way to reach potential customers.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by Eidolon

I'm surprised companies don't use it to allow access to a weblink or maybe store, showing their releases. Seems like an easy way to reach potential customers.

people think of digital as something free. So like you say "why not?" The problem is that it is not and it is something you need to pay for 24/7 it is something you need to make sure it works when you upgrade machines, software and apply patches . It is expensive and if it is not used enough to make it worth the cost companies don't want to pay for it. It is that simple

[HDTV1080P]

Originally Posted by HDTV1080P

The Blu-ray format first came out in the year 2006. Two years later in 2008 the first profile 2.0 BD-LIVE Blu-ray enabled titles appeared on the market. At one time BD-LIVE was so popular that almost every major studio offered Blu-ray titles with the BD-LIVE feature. BD-LIVE would offer online streaming commentary tracks that synced up with the Blu-ray main video, plus streaming extra features, and streaming movie trailers.

However, several years ago Sony and some other major studios as a cost cutting decision turned off their BD-LIVE servers so that the BD-LIVE function would no longer work on the Blu-ray titles that they released. However Universal Studios up until the year 2021 was the last major studio still supporting the BD-LIVE feature with streaming new release trailers and other BD-LIVE content. However, I discovered just recently that as a cost cutting decision Universal Studios has turned off their BD-LIVE main server sometime in the last few months. One can no longer access any Universal movie trailers and other streaming content from the main server. However, on select Blu-ray titles like Fast Five one can manually toggle off and on the BD-LIVE ticker to see a written description of select Universal movie titles that can be read in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This must be one of the BD-LIVE servers that Universal forgot to turn off since other Blu-ray titles when toggling off and on the ticket does not connect to any Universal BD-LIVE server.

I well miss BD-LIVE. A few years ago almost every standard Blu-ray disc from Universal Studios showed trailers of the latest movies being shown in the movie theater if ones Blu-ray player was connected to the Internet and had BD-LIVE feature turned on. While it is technically possible to use BD-LIVE with the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format and Blu-ray 3D format, no studio to my knowledge every used BD-LIVE for 4K Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D discs, just standard Blu-ray discs were used for BD-LIVE.

While its true that every major studio has now turned off their BD-LIVE feature including Universals main BD-LIVE server just recently in the year 2021. There are a select few smaller studios that still have their BD-LIVE server up and running at least partially. For example the Showtime Blu-ray titles that use the BD-LIVE feature still have a active BD-LIVE server up and running, but its only partially working since some of the BD-LIVE content cannot be accessed.

Its too bad BD-LIVE is on life support. The quality of the streams were mainly 720P using 2.0 DTS stereo. Technically BD-LIVE could have been used with 4K streams with surround sound on the 4K Blu-ray format, but no studio decided to do so. Also to make Blu-ray players cheaper in price no standalone Blu-ray player currently in production has a minimum of 1GB of internal persistent storage to use BD-LIVE like many older models offered, instead one has to purchase a minimum of 1GB USB stick, SD card, or external USB hard drive to use the BD-LIVE feature, bookmarks, and resume play feature.

I well miss BD-LIVE, Universal did the best job of supporting the BD-LIVE servers up until the year 2021. Some small studios like Showtime still partially use the BD-LIVE feature for legacy Blu-ray titles. For all new Universal Blu-ray titles BD-LIVE is not even an option. In fact from all new Blu-ray titles being released from every studio that I know, BD-LIVE is no longer an option. Its just to hard to get BD-LIVE feature to work from current in production Blu-ray players including 4K Blu-ray players, consumers have to go buy a external 1GB or larger storage drive and turn on the feature in the menu and make sure their player is connected to the Internet.

BD-LIVE could have been and should have been an awesome feature (like streaming commentary tracks), but BD-LIVE ended up being another failed feature that did not get used to often by consumers that own Blu-ray players.

I just confirmed in the last 48 hours on three different Blu-ray players that Showtime has turned off their BD-LIVE servers. The Showtime BD-LIVE servers were working back in the year 2024 when I tried some of their BD-LIVE encoded Blu-ray discs. Therefore, it might have been sometime in the year 2025 that Showtime turned off their BD-LIVE servers.

As far as I am aware there is no studio that offers the BD-LIVE feature anymore. BD-LIVE allowed studios to download and stream content to a Blu-ray player and it was a common feature on most Blu-ray players in the year 2010+. So now we have no way of testing the BD-LIVE feature on Blu-ray players since all the BD-LIVE Internet servers have been turned off. The studios were not interested in improving BD-LIVE. A improved version of BD-LIVE could have offered 4K Blu-ray image downloads to a 30TB hard drive or offered 4K streaming with lossless audio at around 150Mbps. Instead the studios have decided to use streaming apps built into Smart TV’s as the replacement for BD-LIVE.

Just sad to see all studios dropped BD-LIVE. Currently there is no studios that are planning on bringing back the BD-LIVE feature. This is another negative for the format to lose an Internet based download and streaming feature that has been offered since the year 2008. BD-LIVE first appeared on the market in the year 2008, and around the year 2016 the BD-LIVE feature was greatly improved with faster and more powerful standalone 4K Blu-ray players.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by HDTV1080P

Just sad to see all studios dropped BD-LIVE.

You well might be the only person in existence to mourn the death of BD-Live. All it did was slow the load times for blu-rays and shove ads in our face.

I have had BD-Live disabled on all of my players for many years. Good riddance to it.

[apollo828]

The only time I ever used BD-Live was for Neil Young's first Archives box set. For awhile, he posted new music over there. Music that wasn't ready in time for the pressing, tracks not included for technical reasons but he still wanted people to hear, stuff like that. I liked that. Of course, that required a desire to actually keep the train rolling, which Neil was happy to do for awhile. Guess what? He stopped eventually, and now he can update his web site at will (although he still puts out those Archives box sets).

AFAIK, just about everybody else who used BD-Live used it for junk and maybe, at the beginning, for some EPK-esque interviews that somehow weren't ready at the time of the pressing. That's about it. Studios want to pump out their product and move on, especially since adding more product over time means more costs. It was doomed, especially once streaming took off.