The Director of Marketing for Sony’s Playstation division got up to do a guarded presentation on the Playstation 3.  I got the feeling that the room was less than excited that a gaming machine made up 60% of the standalone Blu-ray player market, likely due to a low attach rate of Blu-ray movies at purchase.   He mentioned that there were 9 million players in the U.S. alone and 27 million worldwide.  After the recent price cut to $299, they have seen an increase in sales; significantly from Xbox 360 / Wii owners.  The current advertising campaign is attempting to broaden the Playstation 3’s reach and expand beyond the 25 to 34 year old demo.   With an interesting tie in, the December release of District 9 is going to include a demo of God of War 3.  I got the feeling that he was angling for more studios to partner with on these game tie-ins.  

After a fantastic lunch (and a drawing for five Playstation 3 Slims that we didn’t win), we launched into the BD-Live panel.  The panel was made up of 4 studio VP’s and Ty Roberts, the CTO of Gracenote.  Gracenote is the service behind iTunes, basically providing all the album information for iTunes.   The studio VP’s got their chance to shill their early attempts at BD-Live integration and well as a couple upcoming features.  Being able to send recipes to a friend via the upcoming Julie & Julia Blu-ray was interesting as well as Lost University, a learning center for all things Lost on the upcoming season 5 Blu-ray release. 

The brilliant mind on the panel was easily Ty Roberts (and it was moving about 100 miles an hour).  His insight into the future of BD-Live was inspiring and filled with potential.  He was launching into hypothetical scenarios like users recreating movie scenes and inserting them into the movie.  The same went for custom soundtracks or recording voice overs via the iPhone to insert them into the movie.  He also mentioned Gracenote’s work in cataloguing all information on Blu-ray discs and being able to pull up that information in a 400-disc Blu-ray changer before even spinning around to the correct disc.   His outlook for BD-Live was very realistic based on his experience with Apple; reaching true market saturation in about 5 years. 

All in all, Blu-Con offered a large amount of insight into the future of Blu-ray discs / hardware.  Everyone seemed fairly positive in the long term adoption, but cautiously optimistic in the growth over the next year.  Interestingly, digital delivery wasn't discussed as in-depth as we would have hoped; but there seems to be room in the marketplace for both formats. 

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3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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