Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, said at a news-conference on Tuesday that the company does not have plans to integrate Blu-ray disc (BD) optical disc drives (ODDs) into Macintosh computers due to complexities with licensing as well as cost.

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from the consumer point of view. It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex… We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives,” Mr. Jobs told audience at an Apple event, reports Beta News web-site.

Hardware manufacturers have to pay Blu-ray disc association (BDA) about $30 in royalties per Blu-ray disc player or drive. In addition, rather complex software is needed to playback high-definition movies. Many of Apple’s rivals, including Acer, Asustek Computer and even Lenovo Group, have integrated BD drives into their computers.

Apple is a member of Blu-Ray disc association, however, Apple said in mid-2005 that it was committed to both emerging high definition DVD standards at the time: BD and HD DVD. In fact, Apple has always been an active member of the DVD Forum which developed the HD DVD standard, and joined the board of directors of the Blu-ray disc association only in March, 2005.

Apple also sells and rents movies via its iTunes store. The firm has been strong supporter of digital content distribution and was hardly really interested in promoting either DVD, now-gone HD DVD or emerging Blu-ray.

Tags: Apple, Blu-ray