Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.
Oh hell no
> As I mentioned elsewhere, I agree that when I'm first watching a movie, I want to get straight to the film and not be distracted and slowed down by a bunch of crap. But the interactivity comes into play for repeat viewing where the user wants to dig deeper into the content.
> Let me clarify what I mean by scaling the movie. Lets say you are a big fan of a movie and you are watching it with some of the special features turned on, like picture in picture director commentary with pop-up factoids. On HD-DVD we could shrink the movie down to say 1/4th of the screen and have all sorts of associated content popping up around it, like storyboards, artwork, film facts, etc. All done at the authoring level. Some of the more advanced blu-rays are starting to figure out how to do some of this on the latest firmware players, but it's complicated and not fully compatible with players. However on HD-DVD that was a spec compliant feature from the beginning.
Personally I disagree with him about HD-DVD being the better format, simply because of the better storage capacity and bitrate allowed by Blu-Ray (as well as how a growing number of HD-DVDs are dying now). However, the interactivity is a pretty interesting idea.
There's a good Reddit comment here from someone who worked on authoring Blu-Rays that explains why this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vdrbr/hey_reddit_its...
Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.