OPINION: Jobs blue on Blu
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 10/17/2008
OCT. 17 | IT CAN’T HAVE thrilled the folks at Disney, who have worked so hard to establish Blu-ray Disc as the next-generation optical disc standard, to hear their largest shareholder call the format “a bag of hurt.”
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
Asked last week why the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops lack Blu-ray drives, Apple chairman/CEO Steve Jobs said, “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”
Ouch.
But the Disney folks, like other Blu-ray supporters, should be equally concerned with what Jobs did next. Two days after the MacBook event, Apple announced that all four major broadcast networks—including, ironically enough, Disney’s own ABC Network—would begin offering primetime series in high-def through iTunes.
Translation: We’re not going to bother with optical discs anymore, even for high-def content.
Jobs’ comments on Blu-ray licensing, of course, merely gave voice to what many others in the industry have been thinking all along.
Between the new intellectual property in the physical format, BD-Java, AACS and BD+, the royalty stack involved in Blu-ray presents a serious challenge to device makers, especially those whose core business is not making disc players.
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com
