Gimmick or not?
If you happen to own Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on HD-DVD, you may have noticed an interesting new special feature called Live Community Screening.
What this feature effectively does is use your HD-DVD player's built in Ethernet connection (standard on all HD-DVD players) to allow friends to watch a movie at precisely the same time and share their thoughts by chatting together live.
How does it work? Quite simple really, one viewer sends out an invitation to friends who all accept to join the screening. Upon doing so, the movie is synced for all viewers. Whilst watching, you can even chat via the remote control. There are obvious problems however. Each viewer would need to have the HD-DVD movie and more importantly, only the person who sent out the invites would be able to pause and control the movie.
Taken from the official HD-DVD website, the Live Community Screening feature is given the following description:
"Gather your own army of fellow wizards for a live community screening party. Invite other owners of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix HD DVD to simultaneously watch from their own internet-accessed players and text with your remote, PC or cell phone. When you host an invitation-only viewing, you control the film by pausing and playing the feature on everyone’s machine. You can chat live with your friends as you watch."
It's definitely a questionable feature and possibly one used mainly to illustrate that not all rival Blu-Ray players come with Ethernet connections as standard. I do enjoy watching movies with friends, but watching movies with friends remotely...that I'm not so sure about.
