The second half of the second paragraph is a bit hard to understand. Could the poster rephrase it? Thanks

I personally would rather studios focus on giving us top quality encodes then useless bloated crap ie., BD-Live.  Good for Warner.

I agree the whole BluRay ordeal was due to the fact too much compression was used even on dual layer studio films and now they are wanting to bloat that?

Good news. Warner understands that it needed more time and space to make BD-Live. I'd rather see nice encoded main movie and hidef audio, and faster release..

WB isnt happy with Blu Ray sales and the only reason he said that was to not make it look like Blu Ray is doing any worse than it already is. It is to the point now where you cant believe a single thing that comes out of a corporate body. Everything they tell you is a big BS lie candy coated with a bit of truth.

"it was harder to sell Blu-ray catalog titles then DVD ones "

Of course, who wants to watch catalog titles (old titles) if they watched years ago 20x? Be real, the studios need to make it the same price as DVD, or below, then sales go up.

"Warner Brothers thinks that consumers will only embrace Blu-ray live titles if they are 'mind boggling' for consumer to get excited."

Well, then they screwed up! Since it does not take much to "boggle" the mind of someone that has run out and bought a standalone Bluray player.

Seriously though...does anyone REALLY give a hoot about BDLive? I darn sure couldn't care less!

I'm surprised that Warner is taking this direction, but I'd rather hear it from Warner USA. Warner was a leader in developing new features on HD DVD and I would expect that they continue with Blu-ray.

Well Warners, are you still happy that you took that mighty big bribe from Sony ? No, I didn't think so. It's hard to work with a violently anti-consumer technology that nobody wants

Wow, so many anti-Blu-ray/Sony comments. What a great way to start the morning. Seriously though, I wish Warner hadn't given up on HD DVD. BD-Live is just fluff that they throw out there to make people think Blu-ray is awesome. It isn't. People just want a quality-encoded movie. Take out all the junk, Warner.

This article claims Warner will be launching BD-Live titles this year, in time for the holiday season: http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Industry_Trends/Warner/BD-Live_Titles/Warner_Planning_Winter_Launch_for_BD-Live/1845

Who cares if an article is claiming something contradictory. Are you going to believe some article you pulled off the net or are you going to believe WB themselves? You can always find BS articles on the net. WB has stated they will not be focusing on this side of BD and until we hear something different that is exactly what I will expect to see.

As for WB and thier move to diss HD DVD, you can bet your a** that they are second guessing that move every time a weekly sales figure for Blu Ray gets announced. Having two formats was supposed to be the thing that was keeping sales down and they were expecting sales to increase dramatically once one of the formats was out of the picture. To say that hasnt happened would be a massive understatment. With HD DVD being far more friendly format towards current SD DVD costomers again you can bet your a** that they are second guessing thier choice to go with Blu Ray every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I think its safe to assume at this point that at the very most HD will be a niche format. Given it will be a niche format that see's sales far above what previous niche formats like Laserdisc have seen. Still I honestly cant see Blu Ray ever getting above 25%-40% of the market. SD DVD will remain the dominant format until they release the next format like 6-8 years down the road. You can bet the studios wont make the same mistake again and it will be a single unified format. By that time HDTV's should be in the majority of US, Japanese and European homes.

Dont let the studios or HD junkies fool you. They have tried convincing everyone that SD DVD's numbers have been going down and that the format is in decline. That is an utter fallacy. Hollywood shipped 1.7 billion discs in 2007, about 30 million more than in 2006 and the total SD DVD base in 2007 increased to 90 million in the US, up 2 million from 2006. Thats right SD DVD grew by more than Blu Ray and HD DVD's total numbers combined and that is of course after losing those people to Blu Ray and HD DVD. Yes overall profits were down by 3% but that can be attributed to lower SD DVD prices, the million people who left SD DVD for HD and the bad situation with the economy. Hell it could be nothing more than a natural fluctuation of the market and could even be attributed to the quality of the films released in 2007 compared to other years. Regardless, the 3% drop absolutely does not reflect a problem or overall decline taking place in the SD DVD market. On the contrary SD DVD is still doing amazingly well, is still growing and once you factor in the sales for HD, there was really no decline at all this year, just a small shift of some of the money being made. The studios and HD people are trying to twist the numbers to mean something they dont.

The bottom line is SD DVD is here to stay and Blu Ray's chances of ever taking over the reigns from SD DVD are about as slim as slim can get. HD DVD would have had a much better chance at achieving a larger market share. That isnt even speaking to the fact that Toshiba has thier Super Upconvertion players soming out this year and those are only going to blur the line between HD and Upconvertion just that much more and is only going to hurt BD's chances just that much more.

The studios and companies did this to themselves and they will have to live with niche status unti; next time around and again you can bet they wont make this mistake again.