"Iron Man" Blu-ray slams Paramount's BD-Live servers

Well, it looks like someone out there's watching Blu-ray movies, if the case of "Iron Man" and the overloaded BD-Live servers is any indication.

So, here's what happened: The Blu-ray for "Iron Man"—which will probably end up being one of the most popular Blu-ray movies of the year, save "The Dark Knight" in December—just came out on Tuesday. Naturally, eager "Iron Man" fans (many of whom probably own BD-Live-capable PlayStation 3 consoles) immediately popped the disc into their new players and hit the "play" button.

Now, those with older stand-alone Blu-ray players—that is, ones lacking Net-enabled BD-Live (a.k.a. Profile 2.0) capabilities—probably didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

But anyone with a BD-Live-capable Blu-ray player—including the millions with watch their Blu-ray discs on their PS3 boxes—saw an animated blue orb (representing Tony Stark's life-saving chest magnet) pop up on their screens. Cool—but then they waited, and waited … and waited. In my case, I stared at the orb (now dubbed the "Blue Ring of Death") for a good 10 minutes before finally giving up.

So, what happened? There'd been some chatter about glitchy "Iron Man" review discs—indeed, I got a replacement review disc myself—so hey, maybe some defective copies got into the hands of retailers. Interesting theory, except for the fact that my new review disc was the one that stalled on my PS3.

Well, turns out the culprit was Paramount's BD-Live servers, which got crushed as thousands and thousands of Net-connected Blu-ray players tried to download the movie's BD-Live features (for now, just a modest multimedia trivia game) all at once.

Paramount just released a statement (so reports High-Def Digest) saying that it has "dramatically" boosted the capacity of its BD-Live servers—and, more importantly, added a menu option that lets you skip the initial BD-Live download and jump right to the main menu.

Two things strike me here: First, it seems ludicrous that Blu-ray discs are designed to load BD-Live features before the main menu loads. Paramount's done the right thing by letting viewers skip the download and jump to the main menu; let's hope the other studios figure that out, especially before "The Dark Knight" (which may end up being to Blu-ray what "The Matrix" was to DVD) arrives later this year.

Also … the very fact that we're hearing complaints about Blu-ray discs tells me that Blu-ray itself is finally gaining some traction. Maybe we're just talking more PlayStation 3 consoles out there, but still—food for thought.

So, did anyone else out there have trouble with their "Iron Man" Blu-ray discs? (The BD-Live features seem to be working fine now, by the way.) Did anyone buy a Blu-ray player/PS3 specifically for "Iron Man"? Or are you holding out until Blu-ray prices finally drop?

Related:
'Iron Man' Blu-ray Hits BD-Live Snag [High-Def Digest]