Blu-ray: Now, Wait, or Never?

New technology from Intel could dramatically change the Blu-ray landscape for the better.

The Blu-ray organization has really upped the pressure in terms of driving the perception that Blu-ray is winning in the market. Sales are increasing sharply, but they were coming from such low numbers in the first place that the total numbers still aren’t that impressive. It is a massive effort, and it does appear to be helping drive a slow increase in Blu-ray sales. However, I remain largely unconvinced that Blu-ray is anything more, at least right now, than something folks occasionally use to showcase their wonderful new TVs. That could change, though. I just got a presentation from Intel’s Digital Home group that suggests that by early next year, I may become a convert.

Personal Blu-ray Use

I currently own seven Blu-ray players: four on desktop PCs, two on laptops, one deck, and one PS3. Currently in my Netflix queue I have nine movies, and two of them are available in Blu-ray. The majority of movies I get from Netflix are still standard DVDs. To date, I haven’t seen a single portable- or manufacturer-sourced automotive Blu-ray system, and as you know, Blu-ray discs only play in Blu-ray players. This means parents with kids, one of the biggest purchasers of DVDs, still have a significant disincentive towards this new format because they can’t use the movies to entertain children while away from home, and the media is both expensive and not any more robust than regular DVDs. So, if they did use them, the kids would destroy the disks just as quickly, and they are still more expensive to replace. And kids don’t really seem to care about Blu-ray, anyway.

Of my laptops with Blu-ray drives, not a single one will easily make it through a Blu-ray movie on battery without making sure everything is in low power mode (including the screen) and, in one case, the laptop won’t even play the movie in low power mode, nor finish it in normal mode. I have to say, watching a Blu-ray movie on a dim screen wasn’t the experience I’d hoped for.

Blu-ray on a laptop screen isn’t that great anyway. But I have found that taking a disk with me to play on a hotel flat-panel TV is kind of fun, though getting a remote to work with a laptop has been a world of hassle, and remembering to pack an HDMI cable to make this work problematic. I generally find that when I have a room with a flat-panel TV, I didn’t bring the right notebook, or a movie, and when I bring a movie and the right notebook, the room has a CRT TV that won’t work. In the end, I generally find TiVo ToGo content or streamed movies from Netflix vastly easier to use.

When it works, Blu-ray is very pretty. But I still find my Toshiba up-scaling DVD player to be just as satisfying, and it makes regular DVDs look much better than my LG Blu-ray player. Even on the LG, I’m finding I use the Netflix streaming service nearly as often as I use it to watch Blu-ray disks, because I still don’t get a lot of those.

However, I may become a full convert next year when some new tech from Intel shows up.

Intel: Third Time’s a Charm

Intel took two previous shots at the digital home. They actually had an early competitor to the iPod, and while it reviewed well, building products became a problem. They then created the Viiv platform and folks wondered if they had lost their collective minds. This time, however, they actually put people in charge of the effort who had a grasp of the market, and the end result could not only be a better Blu-ray player, but a better PC. We’ll leave the PC part for another time, but just imagine if they turned this technology into a PC product.

No One Wanted a PC Experience

The mistake that Intel and others made in the past was thinking folks wanted a PC in the middle of the experience. They don’t. They may want the performance, but no one wants to boot Windows from the couch. What Intel did this time is turn the PC design concept on its ear, and swapped the typical CPU optimization architecture for one that optimized video and focused on a consumer electronics user interface. The end result was a set of technologies that could up-scale better than anything on the market, handle up to three high definition video streams, and do really interesting stuff like video texturing (putting video on objects) to create really compelling menus and media guides.

It’s a natural for things like Yahoo Widgets that you use to find and enjoy unique on-line content, and with the upscaling technology, all of this web stuff would look vastly better. Netflix and Hulu streamed content would upscale as well, and future versions should be able to distribute content around the home, assuming the media industry allows it. This means you’d only need one expensive player, and a series of inexpensive extenders to cover the home and provide content.

Yahoo Widgets

PC Performance, Set Top Box Experience

With this product, you actually get full performance (Pentium M at the start), so the manufacturers have a lot of performance overhead they can play with to create compelling experiences. Think of being able to click on an actor’s face, and get their name real time, or what other movies they were in, without disturbing the flow of the movie for instance. Or, possibly even reorder the movie, dropping the cut scenes that are on many of the discs into where they should be in the movie. There’s room for multiple tuners, gaming, and hard drives, suggesting some really interesting high-end DVR capability could eventually find its way onto these offerings.

So you’d end up with a box that could do anything, from playing Blu-ray movies to YouTube and games, making it all look good on your flat-panel TV, while giving you experiences you just can’t get on a current-generation DVD player, regardless of format.

Wrapping Up

With all of this capability, I’d probably be buying the player more for its other functions than Blu-ray. But if it did that too, I could finally see the value. Granted, I still see Blu-ray as a place holder for streaming, but I could also see it holding that place for several more years. The Blu-ray folks are right that there is no download that yet looks as good as a Blu-ray movie. Their problem remains that there are a lot of things that are good enough, and until a solution that will move content around the home easily shows up, the true next generation video technology is not yet set. Intel, strangely enough, now has a shot at setting it. It’s the best work I have seen them do in years.

To answer the Blu-ray question in short: I’d wait until this new class of players comes out towards the end of the year. If you don’t want to wait, you can still get it in a new TV or set-top box, but I think the best way to get this capability is in a Blu-ray player, because it is more elegant than a set-top box, and you’ll likely want to upgrade it long before a new TV wears out.