High-definition pork

By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 10/28/2005

OCT. 28 | The Blu-ray Disc Assn. is starting to resemble the U.S. Congress when there’s a highway bill to pass.

To get the votes for passage, every state and district gets its pound of pork--sometimes two pounds, depending on where its member ranks on the Transportation Committee.

In the BDA, the pork-barreling began with the interactive layer.

The original plan was to use a system based on the Java programming language that has become known as BD-Java. Once Microsoft, in conjunction with Disney, came up with iHD, however, which is expected to be easier and cheaper to implement than Java, most BDA companies actually preferred iHD.

However, BD-J was already part of the spec and had the support of Fox, which the Blu-ray camp was ardently trying to woo. When it came time to choose, a majority of BDA board members actually voted in favor of iHD. But eight companies abstained, denying iHD the supermajority it needed under BDA bylaws.

So BD-J stayed in, and Fox stayed on board.

Fox was also the driving force behind Blu-ray’s adoption of the BD+ and BD-ROM Mark copy-protection layers, despite concerns they could potentially interfere with the operation of the basic AACS layer.

In an effort to make everyone happy, BD+ and ROM Mark were made mandatory in the Blu-ray hardware spec--meaning player manufacturers must include the capability to respond to them--but are optional in the software spec--meaning studios don’t have to use them if they don’t want.

So far, Fox is the only studio to say publicly it plans to use them.

Warner was next into the bacon, insisting in exchange for defecting from the HD DVD-only camp that Blu-ray incorporate a lower-cost red-laser-based option using a standard DVD for shorter programs.

The Blu-ray spec will now include red-laser BD-9.

Meanwhile, BDA board member Hewlett-Packard is now demanding that managed copy be made mandatory for all Blu-ray discs and wants to revisit the iHD/BD-J question.

Apart from its unwieldiness, the current free-for-all in the Blu-ray Disc spec could end up undermining the very goal of format supremacy it’s meant to achieve.

Although H-P’s new demands initially got a frosty reception from other members of the BDA board, Warner has made it clear it would be very happy to see iHD included in the Blu-ray spec, either in addition to or instead of BD-J.

As a co-developer of iHD, Disney also, presumably, would be happy enough to see it used for Blu-ray. Even Sony voted yea on iHD when it first came up before the BDA board.

With H-P threatening outright defection and studio pressure building, it would be no great surprise to see iHD added to Blu-ray. Should that happen, the hardware companies are going to be very unhappy about having to license and implement BD-J when only one studio plans to use it. At that point, BD-J could get forced out of the spec after all.

Similar pressure could build on BD+ and ROM Mark, which again, only one studio plans to use. Acceding to H-P’s demand for mandatory managed copy, in fact, might require eliminating BD+ if it’s true that, as many in the computer industry fear, the extra layer of copy protection is just a sneaky way to disable managed copy.

By the time all the horse trading is done, it’s possible that the important features of both HD DVD and Blu-ray will be essentially the same: the same logical layer, the same copy protection, the same policies on managed copy. With commercially viable dual-layer Blu-ray discs likely still two or more years off, even the formats’ capacities will be similar: 30 GB for HD DVD vs. 25 GB for Blu-ray.

At that point, the battle will have come full circle, back to a dispute over the physical specifications of the disc and the costs of manufacturing them. And that’s not good ground for Blu-ray to fight on.

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