News: US, Japan to Share Blu-ray Region Code
Blu-ray Disc players and movies expected on sale later this year in Japan and the U.S. will share the same region code, Sony said Thursday.
Current DVD discs and players on sale in the two countries use different region codes so that software bought in one country will not work on players purchased in the other country. The system was designed to allow content producers to better manage release and sale of content around the world.
The theory is that a movie can go to DVD in the U.S. before it hits movie theaters in Japan with little impact on Japanese box-office takings because the U.S. discs won’t play in Japan. In practice, the system has proved easy to hack, and multi-region players that accept software from any region are readily available and popular among consumers.
In all, there are six DVD regions but content producers and hardware makers have been discussing changes for the new Blu-ray Disc system, which is being positioned to replace DVD for high-definition content. Backers of the competing HD DVD format are waiting on a decision by the Blu-ray Disc Association with the idea of using the same region coding system to avoid confusion among consumers.
This is excellent news for us J-music/culture fans. It'll certainly save me a trip to buy a region free blu-ray player in the future.
Comments
Yeah, I heard about this news a while back, and it is definitely a good thing. The downside, at least right now, is that so far Japanese companies are dropping the ball as far as HD releases go (be it HD-DVD or Blu-Ray), releasing titles that are supposedly very terrible quality wise. Hopefully they'll get their acts together and get quality levels to where they should be before any "important" releases come out.
Another interesting element is that Blu-Ray is going to have support for downloadable subtitles. Not saying it is going to happen for sure, but companies could then produce English subs for their releases if it turns out the titles get popular overseas.No matter what, though, it's very cool that we get into the same region with Japan. Doing so at least gets rid of some of the mess of region encoding. HD-DVD is currently region free, but I'm not too sure how long that is going to last.