Courtesy Videobusiness.com


BD-Live Coup: Hellboy Director Set For Chat
November 10, 2008
It's been long rumored as a killer BD-Live app: a filmmaker chats in real time with networked Blu-ray player owners about his or her film. That time has come on Nov. 23 at 6 p.m. PST, when Hellboy 2 director Guillermo del Toro will participate in such a Web-enabled chat. You can find the details here at IGN.com
You can prepare yourself now, by logging onto www.UniversalHighDef.com to register, as well as submit questions for del Toro to answer.
Besides answering fans, the director is also promising to give behind the scenes info about Hellboy 2's production. The chat coincides with Universal's Nov. 11 release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray.
This is an excellent step for the Blu-ray format - so I have to give a huge slap on Universal's back for getting del Toro to participate.
BD-Live enhanced titles have been rolling to stores for most of the year, but retailers confide to me that they have a hard time really marketing it to customers. You can play games, send fave movie scenes to friends...which is a lot of what the kids normally do on Facebook and such. Why do they need BD-Live so badly? But to block out an exclusive time period for Blu-ray users to speak with a famous director is a huge selling point for BD-Live.
Hopefully more studios will follow suit with these sorts of events!

I'd be more impressed if it was recorded and posted up later for download (in snippets per question) as not all of us will be available that day and that time. Still a neat thing that I hope carries over to other films/directors/writers.

I still have yet to figure out how to do the Movie Chat thing after adding several users to my buddy list and being "online" at the same time.