Q. Why do you buy or rent a DVD?

A. To watch a movie.

Q. Why do you buy or rent a Blu-Ray disc?

A. To watch a movie in high definition.

This seems obvious, no? In their release of Iron Man, Paramount Studios seem to have missed this point.

Since DVDs first appeared, I have wished for a “JPTFMA” button on my remote. The acronym stands for “Just Play the F***ing Movie, Already!” Yes, your interactive menus look very nice, but if I can’t start the movie within twenty seconds of inserting the disc, then they are too long. I am also not interested in being force-fed your previews, your anti-piracy message, your advertisements, or your disclaimers. By all means, put this material on there, but give me a way to bypass it instantly.

The studios will, no doubt, be irritated to hear that I now watch DVDs using mplayer on my Linux-powered PC. Thanks to it not being a licenced DVD player, it isn’t bound by the licence terms, and so I can bypass all of that crap.

Going a step farther, while it is not unheard of for someone to watch the extra features or listen to the commentary track, it is rare. This stuff wastes space that could be better used to give us a better picture. Never mind that, though, let’s assume that it’s reasonable for it to be there. That brings us back to Paramount and Iron Man.

It seems that Iron Man came with an interactive quiz game that runs on the BD-Live platform. Apparently, when you use this disc, it connects to the Internet and tries to acquire updates from Paramount before it will allow you to even watch the movie. This, I will remind you, is for an application that few will use.

Making matters worse, apparently Paramount underestimated the amount of Internet traffic this would generate. The Iron Man release drowned their servers in update requests, making them unresponsive. The BD-Live application would just keep re-trying indefinitely until it got a response. Apparently, some folks waited as much as 45 minutes before they were able to watch the movie.

Again, why do people buy Blu-Ray discs?

To watch a movie.

Why couldn’t they?

Because of an application that few would use.

JPTFMA!

On a side-note the privacy advocates amongst us will also note that this also has the potential to generate a lot of data about who has bought this disc. Of course, we all know that this will never be used for evil, right? Right? Yeah, right.