Porn Industry Chooses HD DVD

I was really hoping that Blu-Ray would win the battle to become the high-def technology of choice, but there is some early speculation that HD DVD will beat it out according to this article: HD DVD versus Blu-ray - The porn industry says HD DVD.

It is pretty safe to say that whatever the porn industry chooses will be the winner - just like with VHS over betamax. The main reasons I was rooting for Blu-Ray:

1. It wasn't backed by Microsoft like HD DVD
   
2. Widespread Blu-Ray technology means more jobs for Java programmers (see my previous blog post).

Blu-ray BD-J at LAJUG

This evening I attended the Los Angeles Java Users Group. The topic was Blu-ray and BD-J, a platform for providing interactive content with movies on Blu-ray discs. Several engineers from Panasonic made the presentation, as they are developing Blu-ray products. They also authored the Blu-ray content on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one of the first Blu-ray offerings.



The technology looks interesting and is just starting to break into the market. It occurred to me that it may be a good time to learn BD-J and start a company based on BD-J development while the technology is so new. I talked to one of the Panasonic developers after the meeting, though, and she told me that the spec isn't that "open". There is no way right now to download the spec or some kind of development platform and get familiar with it without joining the Blu-ray Disc Association (which I think costs a lot of money). Granted, I haven't really looked into it that much. Maybe it is easier than she led me to believe.