Certainly, that should not be happening every time, and sounds like a QA issue at the publishing end. From what I remember of Blu-ray disc authoring, content has a tag for the firmware version it expects to see, but can be set to Require or Warn if it finds an older version present - 90% of the time Warn is more appropriate because while the disc author's firmware may be more recent the content doesn't necessarily depend on any features in that version.
I'm curious about whether these were all from the same studio or finishing house (a lot of video publishers outsource the disc authoring to a specialist company, if you are the sort of person who likes to sit through credits you'll see them come up at the very end). Chances are the publishers are not even aware of this problem, since it's not in their interest to make stuff unplayable if it doesn't have to be. Most producers are rather technophobic. I'm sort of curious about which titles were involved, but although I know some people in Hollywood it's unlikely that I'll be able to track down an answer about this.
Plug it into the network (because I learned that if I leave it plugged in the discs spend 30-45 minutes downloading crap over the network that I have no interest in watching)
It seems to me that your real complaint is that the extra features offered my most movie studios are not that great in terms of content. You do want to watch them (or you wouldn't have tried and been obstructed by the download requirement), but are generally disappointed by the quality of the supplementary content after you've downloaded it.
I don't really remember at this point whether they were from the same studio, filming house, nor distributor, nor do I care to dig into it.
As far as the network thing goes: I assume it's extra features, but don't know, it wasn't something I requested, I'd just clicked "play" on the player and, well, watched as it said it was downloading content.
Rather than finding fault with my walking away from blue-ray, could you explain to me why increasing the friction in the experience over what we were used to with DVDs is going to benefit the entertainment industry?
I'm curious about whether these were all from the same studio or finishing house (a lot of video publishers outsource the disc authoring to a specialist company, if you are the sort of person who likes to sit through credits you'll see them come up at the very end). Chances are the publishers are not even aware of this problem, since it's not in their interest to make stuff unplayable if it doesn't have to be. Most producers are rather technophobic. I'm sort of curious about which titles were involved, but although I know some people in Hollywood it's unlikely that I'll be able to track down an answer about this.
Plug it into the network (because I learned that if I leave it plugged in the discs spend 30-45 minutes downloading crap over the network that I have no interest in watching)
It seems to me that your real complaint is that the extra features offered my most movie studios are not that great in terms of content. You do want to watch them (or you wouldn't have tried and been obstructed by the download requirement), but are generally disappointed by the quality of the supplementary content after you've downloaded it.