Is The DVD/Blu-Ray Remote Control Becoming Obsolete?

Your DVD or Blu-Ray remote control, could it's days be numbered?

DVD and Blu-ray machines continue to land on the shelves of retailers everywhere, each looking sleeker and more stylish than the other. Each complete with as many functions, widgets and gimmicks to keep the consumer happy for hours. Whether it be a blu-ray, DVD or hard drive reorder, one thing the manufacturer don’t seem to know what to do with is the remote control. That chunky, cumbersome rectangle with scores of buttons and not enough room to explain what each one does, forever getting lost down the back of the sofa or becoming a play thing for any infant in it’s vicinity where you suddenly find yourself watching a black screen while your child is grinning triumphantly.

The argument is of course that there is no alternative that in years to come machines will be so jam packed full of features that the humble remote control could end up being half the size of the machine itself in order to accommodate it all.

An alternative is now emerging however, the mobile phone. Now we’re only talking about DVD and Blu-ray machines here not the TV or Sky (although you can now control your Sky+ via and app on your mobile phone), DVD and bluray machines are used a lot less and are therefore more likely to have their remote control go walkabout but what’s the one bit of tech that is almost always at your side? Your mobile phone.

It is starting to happen, with the advent of Pocket BLU where blu-ray movies from universal can be controlled from an app on your phone allowing you to play, pause, rewind, fast coward etc aswell as access extra features such as BD-Live. Pioneer are releasing machines with mobile phone control capability built in via their iControl AV application. Yes it’s still in it’s infancy, yes there are teething problems and yes the capability is currently limited to specific manufacturers but if pocket BLU catches on as it appears to be doing with it now being expanded to run on Blackberry, android and Nokia it’s only a matter of time before all movie companies and machine manufacturers catch on and produce a unified protocol leaving the remote control permanently down the back of the sofa.