More on Blu Ray licencing

Final Cut guru Larry Jordan has posted some information about Blu Ray licences, this time from Bruce Nazarian, the head of the DVD association, a lobby group that promotes the DVD format.

"For example, producers of industrial and non-broadcast content are required to pay a $2,500 licensing fee to author and distribute Blu-Ray [...] Then, each producer is required to pay a $3,000 one-time AACS license fee, plus a per-title fee for EACH replicated Blu-Ray disc. Currently, Sony DADC is quoting that fee at $1,585 per title (per complete Blu-ray disc project)."

This information would seem to apply to mass produced BD-ROM discs going by the information in my previous post on the subject. It should be pointed out that similar licences (using the DVD logo on your packaging, applying Macrovision and CSS copy protection to the discs). However it does seem to discriminate against smaller low volume producers, those who want to manufacture professional products but not by the million.

However, on the digital production buzz podcast, Mr Nazarian said that he understood that if a Blu Ray authored file then gets converted to become a disc image, AACS again becomes mandatory. So you would have to burn each BD-R at a time or pay the licencing fees. This would start to affect wedding video videographers, film students, educational filmmakers and small scale documentarians.