Sony beefs up Blu-ray strategy

Sony will also be pushing Blu-ray drives in its Vaio notebooks. (Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)

Even as Blu-ray disc and Blu-ray player sales are growing, Sony is looking to build out its larger strategy surrounding the company's high-definition disc products.

At a small press event in San Francisco yesterday, the company introduced a new feature of BD-Live called MovieIQ, which will be included on some high-profile releases from Sony starting in September. It's essentially IMDb live — while a movie is playing, facts about casting, directors, production and actors' filmographies pop up on-screen. It's powered not by IMDb, but by Gracenote, creators of CDDB, which Sony purchased just over a year ago.

It's the kind of feature intended to keep people from pausing a movie and hopping online to ask questions like, "I recognise that actress, but from what movie?" It's also meant to build on the inherent capability of Blu-ray players that have internet access. Sony has tried to do this by allowing BD-Live access to exclusive trailers and some trivia games, but MovieIQ seems like something that users would engage with repeatedly, not something they'd just use once and forget about.

A senior Sony exec at the event, Tracy Garvey, called MovieIQ the "first killer-app for BD-Live". That sounded like an admission that none of the BD-Live features thus far have been all that compelling.

It's clear Sony is still in the process of fine-tuning its BD-Live strategy. At the event, Sony vice president Rich Marty said that while 37 million Blu-ray discs were sold in 2008, the company has only released about 100 titles that are BD-Live enabled. In other words they still have a long way to go.

"BD-Live is complementary to Blu-ray," he said on Thursday. "It was never meant to compete with the web, it's not a VOD [video on demand] play. We're still building the foundation."