The State of Special Features

With the jump to Blu-ray, people expect more extras with their movies than gag reels and deleted scenes. That means taking advantage of the medium in new ways--and making BD-Live live up to the hype.

On last year's Blu-ray players, BD-Live was a premium feature. This year, it's still an option, but an increasingly less costly one; in fact, the majority of Blu-ray players coming out in 2009 support BD-Live. To do so, a player must have an ethernet connection for Internet connectivity, and at least 1GB of flash memory, either on board or via a USB flash drive.

Though BD-Live promises more interactivity and online connectivity, so far it has been off to a shaky start. Between the , Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (released in April 2008), and others issued last fall, the features boiled down to a couple of lame Java games, access to barren message boards, additional downloadable clips that didn't make the cut for the disc, and--wait for it--trailers for other movies. Still awake?

Things started to change in the fall, though, such that BD-Live is maturing to the point that you might want to try it out. Over 20 titles have shipped with BD-Live content. Social networking looks like the studios' magic bullet: Disney and Pixar, for example, are going far to push their interactivity features. With the 50th-anniversary edition of Sleeping Beauty, Disney introduced Movie Chat, in which you text friends while watching the movie, and Movie Mail, in which you record a video message and embed it within a scene. Disney also offers access to an online trivia game, Movie Challenge; here, viewers compete in real time for Disney Movie Rewards points (credits toward discounted Disney gear). Wall-E offers all of those BD-Live features and heaps on even more, including four video games, a digital storybook, and fly-bys of the film's digital sets.