Cyberlink, Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony, the companies behind the One-Blue, LLC licensing company, will launch a shop product license for patents essential to Blu-ray Disc products on April 1st, 2011. One-Blue also announced that Mr. Roel Kramer has been appointed as CEO of One-Blue. Mr. Kramer, who has been the President of the Blu-ray Disc Association since 2007, succeeds Mr. Jerry Rosenthal, who had served as CEO since One-Blue was established in 2009.

"One-Blue has been designed to provide an important service to the entire industry while at the same time stimulating the growth and adoption for Blu-ray Disc products," said Mr. Kramer.

Since issuing its call for Blu-ray Disc product patents in October 2009, One-Blue has been working with potential licensors to ensure wide adoption of the license program that One-Blue will administer. As part of this activity, new royalty rates under the licenses were recently announced. The new rates are now US$9.00 for a Blu-ray Disc player and US$12.00 for a Blu-ray Disc recorder; US$0.0975 for a BD-read only video disc, US$0.1075 for a BD-recordable disc and US$0.1350 for a BD-rewritable disc. Other royalty rates can be found on the renewed website www.one-blue.com.

One-Blue is another effort to simplify the licensing procedures related to Blu-ray disc products, but the program will most probably face an uphill battle. Currently, there is a number of Blu-ray licensing pools in existence, including Philips, Panasonic and Sony; the BD4C Licensing Group, which was formed by Mitsubishi, Thomson, Toshiba, Warner, Disney last year; MPEG LA; and AACS. It would be hard for all these licensing bodies to agree to license their patents thru One-Blue.

One-Blue said that it is still accepting patents for evaluation and invites any holder of patents essential to optical formats used in Blu-ray Disc products to join the program as a licensor.