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Today's Show:
Since we last talked about the coming of the BD-Live era on Episode #289, we've had a chance to check out some Blu-ray titles with BD-Live functionality.

Good News for Early Adopters
So far, BD-Live is pointless - no need to rush out and upgrade your player.

The three titles we played with are:
The Other Boleyn Girl
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
The 6th Day

You access the BD-Live functionality by selecting it from the Special Features menu.  Nothing happens automatically.  It would be nice if the disc could query the player to see if it supported BD-Live and start some cool interactive functionality without user intervention, but no such luck.  On the PS3 it takes a few minutes for the BD-Live interface to load.  All three discs share the same interface, a selection of categories on the left, sub-options or choices in the middle and the details for those choices on the right.  It's a very basic interface that barely rivals early Nintendo.

Each disc has its own special content in the "Spotlight" category, and they all share the "Previews", "My Downloads", "My Profile" and "FAQ" categories.  Neither The Other Boleyn Girl nor The 6th Day had anything to do in the Spotlight section.  For example, The 6th Day had a list of Blu-ray titles due to ship soon, but without previews or even a synopsis, just a tile and cover art.  It also lists a couple of the special features on other Blu-ray discs, like the interactive blackjack game on the movie 21, but you can't play it - not even a demo version.  All you can do is read about it.

Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story actually includes three special feature clips only available through BD-Live.  All three are of a fake commentator talking about a Dewey Cox song and then a clip of Dewey performing the song.  If you enjoyed the movie, the clips are entertaining, but you'll have to trust us that they aren't worth buying a new Blu-ray player.  The clips are only available in standard definition and take a minute or so to download.

Since the other discs had nothing to offer, we decided to check out a couple movie previews.  Some are available in high definition, which seems like the natural choice for a Blu-ray movie, but the downloads take 10 to 15 minutes to complete.  Then it takes another 3 to 4 minutes for the video to actually start playing.  Overall not a stellar experience.  In fact, on the PS3 at least, the entire experience is sluggish and painful.  It takes a few minutes just to load the BD-Live interface for you to see that there's no reason to have loaded it.  After that it takes a couple minutes to download a clip, a couple more minutes for it to actually start playing, and it's over before you know it.  It's like waiting in line for hours for a roller coaster that isn't very good.

Of course there are a couple discs out there that are supposed to have really fun BD-Live content.  Alien Vs. Predator has an interactive game on it.  The new Sleeping Beauty disc has a bunch of social networking features you pre-teens will swoon for, and maybe that blackjack game on the 21 disc will be worth playing.  All those movies are in our Netflix queues, so we reserve the right to change our minds.  But for now, rest easy early adopter, you aren't missing a thing.

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