A new feature for Blu-ray discs: conventional DVD movies [UPDATED]

Matt Damon stars in the action-filled 2007 sequel "The Bourne Ultimatum,"  one of three movies in the "Bourne" trilogy that will be available on the new "flipper" discs. Credit: Jason Boland/Universal.

Any movie buff with a Blu-ray player and young children knows this dilemma: When a movie you love comes out on disc, do you buy it in the Blu-ray format for the sake of your big-screen living-room TV, or do you buy it as a conventional DVD so it will work on your portable, your laptop and the back-seat DVD player in your SUV? The lack of backward compatibility is one of the central challenges for Blu-ray discs, a format the public has been relatively slow to embrace (although disc sales have been growing rapidly).

Today, Universal Studios announced what seems like an elegant solution: two-sided discs with Blu-ray on the front and conventional DVD on the flip. It's starting with the three movies in the "Bourne" trilogy, arguably the greatest series Matt Damon has made. No information yet on what the discs will sell for, and alas, they won't be available for the holidays or as a package -- each of the three discs will hit the shelves Jan. 19. The Blu-ray side will be full-featured, supporting BD-Live and other Blu-ray niftiness.

Updated, 11:04 a.m.: The suggested retail price will be $29.98, which is what Universal suggests for many of its Blu-ray-only titles. In other words, the studio doesn't seem to be setting a premium price for "flipper" discs beyond what it already commands for Blu-ray.

Universal previously had offered hybrid HD-DVD and DVD discs, back when Universal was in the ill-fated HD-DVD camp, so this latest step is a welcome extension of that effort.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Is 'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter Roger Avary tweeting from jail? [Updated]

Roger Avary pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter in September and may be tweeting from jail. Credit: Los Angeles Times

As is often the case with Twitter, screenwriter Roger Avary recently tweeted about what he had for lunch. It was soy, which, an acquaintance told him, contains a dangerous substance intended to shrink their genitals and reduce their sex drives.

Just another day in Ventura County Jail.

Avary, who won an Oscar for writing the "Pulp Fiction" screenplay, appears to be sending updates to Twitter from the big house. He received a jail sentence in September after pleading guilty to vehicular manslaughter following a fatal crash last year.

We can't confirm that the Twitter account, @avary, actually belongs to Avary. But a second account, @rogeravary, points to the companion profile and contains photos of sci-fi author Neil Gaiman and the Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer.

[Updated, Nov. 27, 2:40 p.m.: L.A. Now reports that Avary was tweeting while serving time in a Ventura County work furlough program. He is now in full-time custody.]

Sony sales slide 20% as global economy erodes profit

Sony saw sales drop nearly across the board in its fiscal second quarter as the consumer electronics and media giant continued to struggle with a withering global economy.

As shoppers around the world cut back on buying televisions, cameras and computers, Sony's revenue plunged 19.8% to $18.5 billion from the same quarter a year ago. Bargain pricing also eroded profit margins, leading Sony to swing from a $200-million profit last year to a $292-million loss.

Sales slipped in all of Sony's divisions except for its financial services business in Japan. Sony's consumer products and devices division, which includes its Bravia TV and Cybershot camera businesses, plunged 36.5% to $8.9 billion as consumers bought fewer electronics and at lower prices. Still, the unit eked out a $99-million operating profit.

Its networked products division, which includes Sony's PlayStation video game and Vaio computer businesses, also saw a steep 24% drop in sales to $3.9 billion. Losses for the unit widened substantially to $654 million, accounting for the bulk of Sony's operating loss in the quarter.

Sales of its PlayStation 3 game console jumped 33% to 3.2 million units, thanks to a $100 price cut that brought the price down to as low as $299. But that was not enough to make up for a 24% slide in sales of the PlayStation 2 and a 6% decline in sales of its handheld PSP console.

Consumers appeared to also have cut back on other types of entertainment. Sales for Sony's music labels, the second largest in the world after Universal Music Group, fell 3%. But the decline was cushioned by a surge in the popularity of Sony's catalog recordings of Michael Jackson, leading the unit to post a $96-million operating profit on $1.4 billion in revenue.

Sony's movie business also took a hit. Sales declined 30% to $1.5 billion as consumers bought fewer DVDs and curtailed trips to the movie theater. Sony Pictures posted a $71-million loss for the quarter.

On a brighter note, the company said it now anticipated lower losses than it had initially projected for its current fiscal year ending March 2010. Sony credits the improved outlook to the ability for its consumer products business to turn a profit, thanks in part to aggressive cost-cutting, and the health of its Japanese financial services business. File under: It's not as bad as we thought.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Coming soon to a PlayStation 3 near you: Netflix streaming [Updated]

Better late than never. Sony today said it will add Netflix's free video streaming service to the PlayStation 3 in November.

The announcement comes a year after Microsoft gave its Xbox Live Gold members access to the Netflix service in November 2008. That move helped turbo-charge the number of subscribers to Microsoft's online service from 14 million last year to more than 20 million today.

Jack Tretton, head of Sony's PlayStation business in the U.S., said what sets Sony's version of Netflix apart is that subscribers won't have to pay Sony any membership fees to take advantage of the service. In contrast, Xbox 360 owners who want to stream Netflix must pay a $50 annual fee for the Gold membership.

(Sony and Microsoft require users to subscribe to Netflix's movie-rental service, which costs between $5 to $29 a month.)

"We see the PlayStation 3 as the ultimate entertainment device," Tretton said in an interview.

Funny, Microsoft said the same thing about its Xbox 360 game entertainment console earlier this year.

The two companies serve up similar fare. Sony's online service, called PlayStation Network, currently has 2,300 movies and 13,800 TV shows. In November, it will add 17,000 Netflix titles to the tally. Microsoft's Xbox Live features more than 20,000 movies and TV shows, including Netflix titles. As for music, neither offers a way to buy tunes. (Xbox Live comes close, letting its Gold subscribers stream Last.fm, an Internet radio channel.)

What about Sony, which owns its own music label?

"My personal opinion is if you're going to do something, do it right," Tretton said, when asked if Sony would introduce a music service to the PS3. "Doing things right is more important than doing them first. But this would be something that would definitely be well received."

-- Alex Pham

*This post has been updated to add the number of Netflix titles Sony said it will add to its PlayStation Network in November.

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

The Hollywood plot to turn DVD renters into buyers [UPDATED]

My colleague Ben Fritz reported today that some of the major Hollywood studios are mulling a plan to raise revenue by making people wait longer to rent movies. The goal would be to boost sales by creating a short window for home video sales before titles become available for rent. The strategy wouldn't work unless the big video rental businesses cooperated, obviously, so the studios would have to buy them off by letting them buy discs at a deeper discount than they do today.

Ben's a news reporter, so he couldn't state the obvious problem with this idea. It's crazy.

I understand that the trends aren't encouraging for the studios. DVD sales are dropping, and delaying rentals might -- might -- reduce the momentum enjoyed by lower-margin rental services such as Redbox's $1-a-night kiosks and Netflix's monthly subscriptions. But the studios' plan is based on the idea that consumers are more sensitive to delay than they are to price. It's true that most of the demand for home video titles is exhausted quickly. But it's absurd to assume that buying and renting are interchangeable in consumers' minds, and that people who ordinarily might rent a title would buy it if that meant they could have it sooner. Maybe I'd see the world differently if I were on a Hollywood executive pay scale, but $3 to $5 strikes me as a much different price point than $15 to $25. Think about it. How often do people go to Blockbuster looking to rent a particular movie and, after finding all the rental copies taken, decide to buy a copy rather than rent something else? 

If Hollywood wants to encourage buying instead of renting, it has to make purchased product significantly more valuable than the rented one. This isn't a particularly easy problem to solve, given that video rental stores have access to the same discs that everyone else has. Some studios have been selling the major rental chains (presumably cheaper) versions of their movie discs stripped of the extra features, but the implication is that the missing features weren't all that compelling to start with -- otherwise, renters would demand them and the rental stores would comply. Nevertheless, the advent of connected disc players opens up a range of possibilities for the studios to provide more content and a better experience to buyers than to renters.

Such an approach would focus on generating consumer demand rather than frustrating it. In an era of expanding entertainment choices and intense competition for consumers' time and money, any move to make it harder for people to get content on the terms they prefer seems self-defeating at best.

Corrected, 1:27 p.m.: The original post said that, "with rare exceptions, there's no differentiation between the copies Blockbuster rents and the ones it sells." In fact, Blockbuster and other video chains have been buying stripped-down versions of DVDs for their rental services, as the corrected post now states.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

ZillionTV gets a new CEO

TV-over-the-Internet start-up ZillionTV changed its leadership today, bringing in a new chief executive to take over for Mitch Berman. The new guy is Jack Lawrence, formerly head of North American operations for Hong Kong toy maker Corgi International. Berman is staying on as executive chairman, he said in an interview.

Start-ups frequently change CEOs in mid-stream, often because the person with the original vision isn't the one with the managerial chops to make it happen. Those are two different skills, after all. But the change at Zillion of Sunnyvale, Calif., is sure to raise eyebrows because of extensive recent layoffs that had one former-employee-turned-blogger suggesting that the company was on its last legs. (The blogger, Brandon Wirtz, offered a similarly dismal spin on the news about Lawrence.)

Berman said the switch in roles was his idea. He wanted to hand the reins to Lawrence -- a longtime veteran of the satellite, cable TV and telecommunications industry -- because the "constant running around and raising money" had been taking too great a toll on his quality of life and his company's momentum. Lawrence will take over the fundraising duties, leaving Berman to strike the deals with content providers, advertisers and commercial partners that are crucial to Zillion's survival.

Unfortunately, Zillion isn't disclosing much to reassure people about its prospects, at least not yet. Berman wouldn't say how much money the company had raised (although Multichannel News reported that Zillion had collected more than $18 million by the end of last year), who its distribution partners were, how many titles it had in its library or what content deals it had signed (granted, the company counts five Hollywood studios among its investors). As for the layoffs, Berman said the company has morphed from a technology developer into a media and marketing operation, and so there was no work left for some employees to do.

He said more confidence-building announcements were soon to come. The company launched last month in communities where it doesn't have an ISP partner, offering the service to anyone who agrees to pay the one-time equipment fee of $99. But Berman wouldn't say where those were, nor did he disclose how many customers had signed up. So there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical about Zillion. Nevertheless, I'm paying attention to the company because I'm intrigued by its business model. Offering a subscription-free twist on online video-on-demand, Zillion says its customers will be able to buy, rent or watch movie and TV programming for free in exchange for viewing personalized commercials. It's not exactly a replacement for cable TV, nor is it a gateway to all the video riches the Web has to offer. And the most innovative aspect of the business model -- free viewing with targeted ads -- still has to be proven before Zillion is likely to get the studios' most compelling content. Yet its user interface is great, and the picture quality it demonstrated this year was impressive. So stay tuned.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Film Fresh to offer Hollywood movies in DivX

Online movie retailer Film Fresh announced today the availability of movies from four Hollywood studios in the DivX format, marking the latest step forward for the downloadable movie business. DivX had previously announced licensing agreements with Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount and Lionsgate; FilmFresh, which had already been offering some independent and foreign titles as downloadable DivX files, becomes the first U.S. retailer to take advantage of DivX's new relationship with Hollywood.

The main shortcoming for DivX is that DVD players and other devices require special software to decode and decrypt the format. But DivX compatibility has spread rapidly through the consumer electronics industry, most recently among TV makers and mobile phone manufacturers. Its main advantage over the formats used by other downloadable film outlets (e.g., Amazon and Apple) is that its domain-based DRM makes it far simpler for consumers to watch protected DivX movies away from their computers. DivX files can be stored on portable hard drives, USB drives and memory cards, enabling them to be moved easily and cheaply from screen to screen (assuming the device they plug into is DivX compatible). And any computer with a DVD recorder can burn a protected DivX download onto a standard disc. By contrast, creating a DVD with the CSS DRM that Hollywood studios favor requires a special burner and customized discs.

Rick Bolton, chief executive of Film Fresh, said his site would have about 600 Hollywood titles today, consisting of a mix of new and old releases. The addition of the major Hollywood studios signals a transformation of the online retailer...

Like peanut butter and chocolate? Panasonic to promote 'Avatar'

Panasonic is hoping to ride the 3-D wave that's being stirred up by the "Avatar" movie trailer released last Thursday.

The Japanese consumer electronics company today said it would help promote the upcoming movie from director James Cameron. This is no surprise, given that the movie's producer, Jon Landau, went on stage with Panasonic in January to promote the company's efforts to produce a 3-D television for the home at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Unlike Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive at DreamWorks Animation SKG who believes 3-D is best seen in theaters, Landau and Cameron say 3-D content can be produced for home viewing as well.

That's certainly Panasonic's hope. The company, which makes flat-panel TVs, has applied its considerable research muscles to developing 3-D TVs. And it's hoping that the visual eye-candy promised in "Avatar" will help it sell its 3-D capable TV sets the way chocolate can help make peanut butter sexier.

"3-D is not something you watch," said Panasonic CEO Yoshi Yamada. "It's a place you're taken to."

This fall, as part of the promotion, viewers will be taken to custom-built trucks touring the country and outfitted with 103-inch Panasonic TVs to view 3-D footage of the big blue aliens of "Avatar." Hopefully, that will generate more favorable impressions of the movie than what's been whipped up so far from the online, 2-D trailer.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

YouTube to show Sony's "Ghostbusters" this week for film's 25th anniversary

"Ghostbusters" from 1984: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Credit: Sony Pictures

YouTube and Sony are crossing the streams.

YouTube is now hosting a weeklong showing of Sony's comedy classic "Ghostbusters" in honor of the film's 25th anniversary.

Oddly, when the film plays for seven days on the world's No. 1 online video site, it will be not be in a YouTube player. It will instead be piped in through Sony's Crackle player, which will be embedded on the site.

That's a considerable departure* for YouTube, whose brand has for years been synonymous with its trademark square video player, with big buttons and a small screen.

That YouTube is allowing a major Hollywood studio to plop down a foreign video player in the middle of its site is the latest sign that the platform has become more receptive to the entertainment industry's advances. For some time, YouTube has been keen on moving away from its early reputation for amateur content and unauthorized clips from TV shows -- in part because there's no money in those areas.

Sony is currently developing Ghostbusters 3. L.A. Times Hero Complex blogger Geoff Boucher spoke with Dan Aykroyd about the film in May. 

The showing, which will appear in a 16x9 aspect ratio at "high quality" resolution (as opposed to YouTube's league-leading jumbo HD player) will feature seven or eight in-stream commercials. The revenue will be shared between partners Sony and YouTube, with the studio taking the majority of the proceeds.

-- David Sarno

*Corrected, 10:26 p.m.: YouTube has been featuring Crackle-powered videos for several months, so the departure happened a while ago while the Tech Blog wasn't looking.

Follow my variable-rate stream of tech and culture-related musings on Twitter: @dsarno

Now it's Kaleidescape's turn to cry [UPDATED]

In back-to-back rulings this week, a federal judge in San Francisco and a California appeals court in San Jose have blocked or threatened two products that let movie buffs shift their collections from plastic discs to hard drives. The MPAA hailed the rulings against RealNetworks' RealDVD software and Kaleidescape's home movie servers as victories for the rule of law, but what was really at stake was the studios' influence over how their products are consumed. By defeating Real and Kaleidescape in court, the studios and the DVD Copy Control Assn. (the inter-industry group that sued Kaleidescape) have made it harder for companies to develop new ways for people to watch Hollywood fare at home. And in doing so, Hollywood is attacking the perceived value of its products and cutting off potential outlets for growth.

The concurring opinion by Judge P.J. Rushing in the Kaleidescape case outlined the pointlessness of the DVD CCA's insistence on enforcing the letter, rather than the spirit, of its contract with the company.