BD-Plus technology timetable accelerated

Sony predicts Blu-ray enhanced disc to be ready by year-end

By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 4/13/2007

APRIL 13 | After unexpected attacks on high-definition disc copy-protection, studios are speeding up development of one potential weapon, BD-Plus (BD+) technology.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment believes it will deliver a BD+ enhanced disc by the end of 2007.

Now only available for the Blu-ray Disc format, BD+ is designed as an extra layer of protection for high-def’s AACS system. Although AACS is considered an improvement over standard DVD protection, ripped copies of HD DVD movies were available for download on BitTorrent in January, just months after the launches of these formats. Blu-ray discs are also encoded with AACS, and ripped Blu-ray movies have also popped up online.

BD+ allows Blu-ray discs to install and run a piece of encryption software on the player, so in principle, each title can have a unique encryption scheme. That means that a hack only affects that single DVD copy and does not cause security breaches with other consumers’ copies of that DVD.

Also, BD+ can detect tampering to a player, refusing to play once any manipulation to hardware is discovered.

Sony, among other studios, believes BD+ allows them to produce secure, yet consumer-friendly product, because only the hacker is punished for comprising copy-protection.

“Sony has been focusing more on BD+ than before the attacks occurred,” said Don Eklund, executive VP of advanced technology for SPHE. “Still, work needs to be done in terms of verifying the BD+ discs on all of the players and in sorting out the production process when authoring the titles.”

Eklund estimates that adding the BD+ layer can add as much as a week to a month of extra production time to a Blu-ray title.

Currently, Sony and a number of other studios are in various stages of approving BD+ use for Blu-ray titles. No Blu-ray backer is required to include BD+.

In addition to Sony, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment also is known to be keen on implementing BD+ on its titles.

Cryptography Research is engineering the BD+ technology. Its president and chief scientist Paul Kocher confirmed that the timeline to deliver BD+ has accelerated since the AACS attacks, but he declined to provide a specific update on its development.

However, sources indicate that all testing of BD+ on currently available Blu-ray players has been completed. For the last few months, studios also have been working with a variety of BD+ test discs.