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Interactivity supposedly allows you many new possibilities between your TV and your high-def movies, but is these features ready for prime time? Plus: The head of Paramount Studios rushes in. Los Angeles - In today’s world Interactivity is a hot topic in the world of high-def movie discs. All the new interactive features allow you to do lot more from your TV, but the question is are they ready for prime time? Two levels of interactivity are being discussed at the DisplaySearch HDTV Conference 2007 here this week. The first level includes on-disc interactivity, which refers to games and pop-up information intended to supplement the movie being played. The second level includes Internet-connected interactivity such as sharing, shopping, social networking and downloading extra content like trailers, new features, subtitle tracks and audio tracks.

The New Role Of Players

On -disc interactivity today can be easily handled by the Blu-ray players (as in the case of the Liar’s Dice game on Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest)., Only the PlayStation 3 currently can be upgraded to handle Internet-connected interactivity out of all existing devices that handle Blu-ray. All HD DVD players have an Ethernet port and support Internet connectivity. Titles like Universal’s Heroes and Evan Almighty are basically there to permit you to do things like download content and shop. According to Universal 40 percent of consumers who bought the Heroes HD-DVD disc has signed up for an online account. Due to the geek appeal of this NBC series, I’m not astonished that this has happened. But somehow I doubt that Evan Almighty will even garner anywhere near that level of support. The HD DVD camp is quite high on promoting the fact that its network-connected interactivity is available today–and certainly Blu-ray has to play the catch up on that front and sure it will definitely go on. Though Blu-ray is capable of providing development of the hardware and software and similar features needed to actually do so but is lagging far behind HD DVD’s progress. Here I really want to raise a question whether interactivity is truly meaningful at this point anyway?? Like for instance, according to Andy Parsons, of the Blu-ray Disc Association, “Picture and sound are what motivates people to check out the high-definition movies. Interactivity is difficult to explain to people; that’s not what someone is going to the store to check out.”

Hard Explanation Of Interactivity’s Benefit

One of the most difficult thing to market people is interactivity. The community aspects of sharing bookmarks and rating collections–the selling points that the HD DVD camp is talking up–will gain steam only when we the technology attracts a critical mass of users who use the content and the ancillary social networking conceived around that content. The same fear lures over the social networking components of Joost.com, the “Web TV” streaming site. Neither Blu-ray nor HD DVD is even close to achieving the necessary critical mass. This the reason why movie studios aren’t fully primed to offer such interactive and connected features on a large scale either. So far, the king of the pack is Universal: This week it introduced its U-Shop component tied to the release of Evan Almighty. So would there be a stampede of customers who would be there to shop for Evan Almighty tie-ins and just dying to buy into a high-def format? But to me it doesn’t seem likely.