There was once a time when having a director's personal commentary on your favorite DVD was the best way to hear their behind-the-scenes thoughts on the movie. No longer. Last month The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan had a live chat with thousands of people who watched the movie synchronously on their own Blu-ray players from their own well-worn couches. Viewers used their remote controls and the interactive format called BD-live (BD="Blu-ray Disc") to send in questions; Nolan answered in kind, and could even pause all the viewers' Blu-ray players when he had to answer the call of nature. (According to one blogger, Nolan said Dark Knight "is a 2-pee movie. I need to make a shorter film next time." Yeah, just think about what that ending that never ended did to all of us who saw it in the theater, buddy.) BD-live has had some trouble getting out of the gate, with no breakthrough features yet and seemingly low consumer awareness. But Pioneer says it's excited about the possibilities, and the company revealed three new BD-live-enabled players at CES, all due to come out this spring. (Pioneer already sells one high-end BD-live-enabled player, but they leapt in after some other manufacturers because they wanted to make sure they got the implementation right.) The folks at Pioneer say the successful (despite some technical glitches) Nolan event showed the feature's potential; in this more interactive format, Nolan presumably felt more free to open up about his bathroom trips, and he also revealed that the scene where The Joker handed over a nail clipper--in addition to a bunch of knives--in the police station was ad-libbed. Which raises the question of why Heath Ledger had a pair of nail clippers in his pocket at all. Which points out the value of interactive director commentary: I need Christopher Nolan to explain this! Over at Engadget, Darren Murph mentions another potential breakthrough feature for BD-live: a company called Dreamer's newly released plan to better integrate the service with the existing Internet--which is, when you think about it, rather popular--could "actually make BD-live useful."
