Social Networking Coming to Blu-ray Movies

By Paul Munn | November 15, 2008

This week’s PlayStation Store update included a trailer from Disney that frankly shocked me with the feature set they’re going to be implementing with their Blu-ray releases. It’s called the BD-Live Educational Demo on the Store and it’s talking about infusing Blu-ray releases of their classic movies — Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella seem to be showcased — with internet-enabled social networking features like a trivia game, live online chat, and video mail. BD-Live was added to the PS3 in Firmware 2.20 back in March. I’m pretty sure some of these are going to be PS3 exclusive features unless you’ve seen a standard Blu-ray player with a webcam attached to it on the market. I haven’t.

In the past we’ve seen BD-Live touted as a way to connect to websites to download movie trailers for sequels to the movie you’re watching and other things like that but it looks like Disney is going all out with this new generation of movie releases with some impressive features focused squarely on the internet generation that might be just starting to think about buying Disney movies now that the HD disc format war is over.

The proof, however, is in the final release, which reminds me: Can anyone out there recommend movie sites that do great reviews of Blu-ray releases and their feature sets? With so many older films now getting re-released on Blu-ray it’s important to know what’s worth seeing or getting on Blu-ray and what would be just fine on DVD.