Panasonic lab grows with Blu-ray format
Company currently working on picture-in-picture, BD Live
By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 6/1/2007
JUNE 1 | UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif.—Panasonic’s Hollywood Lab is expanding its research and development facility here and its staff to grow with the Blu-ray Disc format.
Since its inception in 2001, PHL has grown to four times its original building area size and two years ago moved into a large space near the NBC Universal executive offices.
To date, PHL has authored and developed about 12 titles featuring BD-Java, the format’s interactive technology, for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Buena Vista Home Entertainment. Fox’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Buena Vista’s first two Pirates of the Caribbean films—all representing some of BD’s most progressive efforts—are among Panasonic’s credits.
The lab is now asking studios and filmmakers for help infusing titles with picture-in-picture and Web-enabled BD Live features.
“We are opening our doors to directors, producers, the big household names, through our relations with the studios—they want to learn about Blu-ray,” said Eisuke Tsuyuzaki, VP of corporate development and general manager, Blu-ray Group for Panasonic R&D Company of America. “Getting the endorsement and backing of the creative community is paramount.”
Picture-in-picture, where a separate video stream plays on top of the running feature film, will debut on a BD title this year, says Tsuyuzaki. This coincides with the BD Group’s Oct. 31 deadline mandating that all new hardware models launching after this date must handle picture-in-picture playback.
PHL also is testing a BD Live prototype title, which will likely street by early 2008.
One key sticking point to BD Live’s bow is the unsolved issue of where to hold the downloadable content. Conceivably, at least one server must be involved for BD players to grab online material, which would update BD discs.
But there are questions about which content supplier(s) would ultimately control such content staging areas.
“Studios are protective, and they have proprietary product, [and] I would anticipate a number of different BD Live services but maybe hosted by one company,” said Tsuyuzaki. “The studios are going to be extremely protective in how they distribute their value-added content.”
Also, the BD Java programming language requires further development to run any BD Live features.
“It’s no good to just be able to connect the consumers to the Internet. There needs to be something compelling there,” said Tsuyuzaki. “There will probably be a phased approach. We will start with the simple downloading of subtitles and audio tracks, and then the downloading of trailers. [Next], comes an e-commerce application, [followed] by some kind of an event. This might be where everyone comes in and can talk online with a director at a certain time.”
In addition to BD Java and BD Live, PHL also has been involved in research and development of the format’s advanced codec MPEG 4 (also known as AVC) and copy-protection technologies AACS and BD+.
