14 DAY TRIAL // One of the features that the entertainment industry had to abuse of was the adoption of the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats. Their introduction meant that movies could be played-back at a higher quality than by using normal DVD disks, and that was possible due to the very high capacity of these new formats. And the entertainment industry's top dogs, like some overgrown kids, had to play with their new toys, and make a fortune out of it while doing so.
I've figured out why is that all of these new apparently incredible new products keep appearing just at the right time and in the right place. Need I say it again? Money. The one reason "under the sun" that unites like no disaster ever could, and think of it, just when sales had taken a linear evolution and money weren't flowing like they used to, the people have to be "persuaded" into believing that they absolutely need that device, gizmo, gimmick or whatever they are selling.
Such is the case with the new formats, everybody was doing just fine when it comes to portable storage, I mean, complaining about a 4.5GB disk of "not being large enough" is the perfect example why you should buy another hard drive. But the capacity isn't the only thing that these people are marketing through Blu-ray and HD-DVD, interactivity is the name of the game. The Blu-ray Disk Association introduced a new set of minimum specifications for players manufactured after the 31st of October, and among those, there is the strong case of all players having to support BD-Java, the programming language designed to create the menus and the interactivity on a Blu-ray disk. One of these interactive menus designed for certain movies allows users to play games directly from the Blur-ray disk or by a special option, from the Internet.
Among other things, the minimum specifications include a minimum storage requirement of 256MB for stand-alone player, while HD-DVD only need 128MB, an 1GB for the BD Live feature which allows players to "download additional entertainment content from the Internet". In addition to this, the players are "forced" to support on-demand picture-in-picture from a secondary video stream and second art audio mixing for "mixing sound effects generated within the player with the soundtrack". The upgrade to the BD-Java isn't related to a new version of the programming language, but more to the code used to run the necessary features.
What the future holds for these players is the lack of compatibility, such as the means of being able to play on-demand picture-in-picture commentaries, a feature that hasn't been yet implemented, nor will Internet connections be possible for future interactions that will be integrated on the disks. So the best chance you've got if you do own a Blu-ray player is that new features that are going to be implemented on the disks will not be available to you, but you can still use them, if you buy another Blu-ray player. As of now, no firmware upgrades have been announced that could make this change easier.