Bill Hunt has an excellent interview with Andy Parsons of Pioneer, from this year’s CES.

Briefly, Mr. Parsons says that two reasons Pioneer went with Blu-ray is the increased capabity (50GB vs 30GB for HD DVD) and higher throughput (54Mbps vs 36Mbps). The higher transfer rate will allow 40Mbps for the video alone. Maybe just a bit of overkill there, but it’s nice to have. It’ll give the most pristine looking HD images from any current technology.

Pioneer is targetting May for their new high end Blu-ray player, the Elite BDP-HD1. They’ll be charging a premium for it, trying to recoup some of their investment. Just like all new technologies.

Mr. Hunt had an interesting question about managed copy:

BH: Now I understand that Blu-ray Disc’s managed copy system will allow the content on select titles to be copied to a home media PC or to a portable device for viewing away from home?

AP: Well actually, the managed copy function is mandatory on software titles, but the hardware does not necessarily have to support it. The other thing about managed copy is that no one has really gotten down to the details yet on how it’s gonna work from a cost point of view. It’s probably not reasonable to expect that you’ll be able to make a copy of something and access it forever for free. Otherwise you could just go rent a movie and copy it to your harddrive - that’s not something that’s really fair or intended. So there’s a transactional side to it that has to be worked out. Our first player doesn’t support managed copy, simply because that whole structure’s not in place yet. That’ll take time.

Also interestingly, and contrary to other reports, Mr. Parsons says that the BD-J stuff is all done. There’s also mention of the PS3, with which I’ll close.

BH: What’s interesting is that the gamers out there… there weren’t many of them who were thinking about watching movies on their PS2s. But since the PS3 is going to be high-definition and Blu-ray capable right out of the box, it’s going to be a real wildcard for the growth of this format.

AP: You’re right. The PS3 is going to represent an almost overnight population explosion of Blu-ray capable players. That’s not something that’s really happened before. The PlayStation 2 helped, because that came well down the road after DVD launched, but it did help to get a lot of players out there. But this is something new. The PS3 is launching right at the forefront of Blu-ray Disc. If Sony ships the kind of numbers we expect them to this year, that will provide a very rapid growth of players out there hungry for titles. We’ve been hearing between 4 and 7 million units could ship. And if you look at PlayStation Portable, with UMD discs, everyone is shocked at how many titles have shipped for that platform. And they’re selling as well or better than the game software. So I think Sony has proven that they can drive a new video format like this with their gaming platforms.

Check out the full interview over at The Digital Bits.

Digital Bits - Pioneer’s Andy Parsons Talks Blu-ray Disc