Reel Word

Recently Kevin Kelly posted a blog titled Better Than Free .  (He essentially leveraged Clayton Christensen’s ideas from Innovator’s Dilemma.)  Kelly posited that “When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.”  He went on to describe “eight generatives better than free”; immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, findability.  

BluRay disks are currently being marketed primarily for the high definition quality of their image.  Behind this, they are being loaded up with linear content extras that take advantage of the much higher capacity of the BluRay discs’ technology (blue laser) relative to standard definition DVD disc’s technology (red laser). 

At the JavaOne show in 2005, Java creator James Gosling suggested that the inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine as well as network connectivity in BluRay disc devices will allow updates to BluRay discs via the Internet; adding content such as additional subtitle languages and promotional features that are not included on the disc at pressing time (source: Wikipedia BluRay entry ).

My $99 standard definition DVD/VHS combo device has “angle” and “zoom” buttons of the remote that have never been made active by the content. 

BluRay disks have the potential of being more than huge data buckets; efficient delivery systems for large amounts on content.  By design in their technical specifications, they are capable of seamless interactivity, game play, and other stand-alone features that take them far beyond the capabilities of standard definition DVDs – or any of the mass market BluRay DVD disks that have been released to date.

But I would argue that loading the disks with content and building these capabilities onto the disc itself is neither the best business application nor the best creative application of the new technology specs to which the discs and the players have been designed. 

Per Kevin Kelly’s point, as long as content can be rendered visible/audible at playback, it can be captured and redistributed by someone else.  All content loaded onto a BluRay disc is a nicely packaged challenge to hackers. 

Per James Gosling’s comment, if the content on the disc can be updated through web connectivity and the storage capacity on the playback device, why not leverage that flexibility and connectivity to the artist’s and their rightsholder’s advantage.  Why not use that feature to help the artist direct their creativity in ways that help them monetize their work – or gain whatever other benefit motivates them (ex. attribution, attention, etc.) in a way that “promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. 

I have previously blogged that the linear content should be viewed as the extreme end-member of a multimedia landscape that includes bonus content of all types, community, commerce, data, gaming, virtual worlds, enhanced reality, and a panoply of emerging and yet-to-be developed elements. 

Perhaps what BluRay discs contain should only marginally exceed – albeit in high def – what consumers expect to be on standard definition DVD discs.  Then, taking advantage of the connectivity and ability to accept data updates built into the design, the BluRay discs should be loaded with highly robust and renewable cryptographic keys to enable legitimate access to online resources.  This would be an more defensible, and an infinitely more monetizable, use of the BluRay infrastructure.

There are a growing number of online sites serving up HD content, including UGC HD content (ex. Vimeo), so compression problems, ‘pipe capacity’, and other technical obstacles to the movement of large data files over the internet appear to be falling away. 

The gaming industry’s global deployment and market adoption of MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) has shown that real-time interactivity with minimal latency is possible for a very large market population.   

The disc should contain enough bonus material to distinguish it from SD DVD, just as the first music CDs contained a few bonus tracks not available on cassettes, in order to motivate consumer adoption.  But they should not contain so much content as to become a frontline in the battle between the hacker’s desire to liberate the content and the artist’s and rightsholder’s desire to gain benefit from the content and maintain the incentive to keep creating and/or funding creativity and innovation. 

Renewable BluRay technology could become the secure mechanism for establishing a legitimate content distribution and access environment that benefits BOTH the consumers / secondary contributors / repurposers of the digital media and the primary creators of the digital media.