Blu-ray

Warner Home Video is making waves in the Blu-ray market place. The deep discounts will start in the fourth quarter of 2008 with attractive price initiatives for retailers. Hopefully, the retailers will pass these point-of-sale rebates along to consumers.

How deep are these deep discounts, and are there any titles we really care about?

Caveat emptor. Just because you've purchased the newly released Gangs of New York on Blu-ray, and spent hundreds upgrading your home theater, don't expect a brilliant viewing experience.  On the contrary, this release can almost be used as an example of what NOT to do on Blu-ray.

The Japanese Web site, AV Watch, is reporting that energetic Pioneer engineers have demonstrated an optical disc with 16 data layers, yielding a capacity of 400 GB.

Before Blu-ray has even been completely accepted into American households, the hacks have begun. Bluraymods.com is selling two new products: a completely region-free Panasonic Blu-ray player that they've modified, or a do-it-yourself kit that lets you alter the internal coding to allow the same Panasonic player (DMP-BD30) to play Blu-ray discs from any region. But it ain't cheap.

Dr. Evil had it right. One billion dollars is a lot of money. Apparently, it's also the lucky number that Hollywood execs are looking for to call Blu-ray a success. They believe they'll hit that number, and are aiming for $2.5 billion at the end of 2009. Optimistic, or naive?