RSSUnified Blu-ray licensing is remedy to 'bag of hurt'
By Tim Conneally | Published February 25, 2009, 6:00 PM
One of the most repeated and memorable quotes from the tech world in the last six months was Steve Jobs referring to Blu-ray as a "bag of hurt," not for any consumer end shortcomings, but rather for its complex licensing process.
Today, Sony, Phillips and Panasonic issued a joint press release announcing the creation of a "one stop shop" for Blu-ray licensing that will seeks to simplify and cheapen the process. The idea has been discussed numerous times since 2007, well before Blu-ray had even won the high-definition format war.
The license company created by Panasonic, Sony and Phillips would be a single point of contact for all essential patents for Blu-ray, DVD and CD technologies. Previously, for a manufacturer to make a disc player, licenses had to be obtained from no less than three separate bodies simply for the fundamental technology behind an the player.
Licenses were sometimes in excess of $20 per player depending on the type of machine being created. The new licensing fees taking effect later this year will be $9.50 for a Blu-ray player, $14 for a Blu-ray recorder, 11¢ for a read-only disc, 12¢ for a recordable disc, and 15¢ for a rewritable disc.
"By establishing a new licensing entity that offers a single license for Blu-ray Disc products at attractive rates," said Gerald Rosenthal, CEO of Open Invention Network, who will head up the new company. "I am confident that it will foster the growth of the Blu-ray Disc market and serve the interest of all companies participating in this market, be it as licensee or licensor."
HEY! $14 per box/15¢ per disk. Who do these people think they are? Microsoft?
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|I assume the price per player and blu-ray discs will go down as a result of this?
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|Probably not.
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|Blue Ray is an old technology ( DVD ) Shined up to a new way. It was an expensive bill of goods perpetrated on an ignorant audiance where the players ( Sony, Phillips and Panasonic ) sought to line thier own pockets. HD-DVD was a simple upgrade technology to the same thing and cost a fraction of the cost, but didn't make the players as much money. Blue Ray is a rip off and just plan makes me mad. If you can't tell I am pissed off that they one the format wars.
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|And I'm pissed off at your poor grasp of the English language.
"audience", "their", "Blu-ray", "plain" and "won" are the spelling mistakes. The grammar mistakes would take me too long.
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|The only thing I can ascertain from your post is that you know nothing about either technology. I would assume you bought an HD-DVD and when the format died got stuck with a bunch of disc's and an obsolete player. Technology wise Blu-ray is far superior, based off a more advanced way of storing data. There was never a question about that which was new and superior, it was Blu-ray, since HD-DVD was just a smaller laser on the same discs. The question was, do we stick with the more compatible but smaller capacity disc's or do we move on. Apparently in the end it was time to move on, maybe you should try to too.
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|Wow. You apparently know nothing... just because "HD-DVD" has "DVD" in the name doesn't mean it's a "simple upgrade". Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use violet lasers to read discs that contain smaller pits than a DVD, allowing for more storage.
It's not a simple upgrade technology.
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|how about when he typed "can you tell I'm mad who ONE the format war" LOL
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|DVD "is an old technology ( CD ) Shined up to a new way". It's called evolution. Unless you're from the south, in which case DVD magically materialized by God's will.
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|What the hell is "Blue Ray"! ;)
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|You can disagree but my god, are you the official internet English teacher??
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|Who really gives what Jobs thinks or says when his company has such a miniscule piece of the computing market?
Apple builds toys, not enterprise class professional equipment and until Jobs and Apple start acting like adults and building products that are enterprise worthy, they'll always be toys selling a miniscule amount!
Actually, it appears Jobs has AIDS so here in the very short future his opinion won’t matter much anyway!
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|luvwknd98 - Perhaps you should care what Apple thinks. They do own hollywood you know. They may not be in your enterprise... but in the enterprises they exist in: Microsoft doesn't. Lets see who else does apple have influence over... oh yes. Disney.
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|damn, AIDS? is that the latest rumor?
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|That's still stupidly dear from a volume licensing perspective.
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