The Burbank-based media giant in October is planning to unveil its "BD-Live Network," which takes advantage of a second generation of Blu-ray video players and discs that few consumers have even heard about.

The players and discs not only feature the high definition video and audio of regular Blu-ray but are interactive and Web-capable – hence the BD-Live name.

Underscoring the importance of the initiative to Disney: The network is getting a kick start Oct. 7 with the release of the 50th Anniversary edition of "Sleep ing Beauty," one of the company's all-time favorite animated tales. A month later the recent box office and critical hit "Wall-E" will be released in BD-Live format.

The Disney network plays off of the viewing habits of today's tweens and teen-agers, who often text message and talk on the phone with their friends – all while watching a movie or TV show. A video game can be in the mix as well.

Here is how it works:

Parents must buy BD Live Blu-ray disc players, which can be hooked up to the Internet and allow movies to be played simultaneously in multiple homes. Then, once a movie gets going, kids can chat about the action using the player's remote control or even a laptop or smart phone – all in real time.

Viewers also can record and send video images of themselves within the context of the movie, in what Disney calls "Movie Mail."

As if that weren't enough, viewers can play trivia games about the movie as they watch, and garner rewards points that they can cash in for online goodies.

Sound complicated?

Not according to the experts, though some believe there may be more fundamental problems. One big one is the limited pool of Blu-ray players.

"The problem is not that BD-Live is too complicated, it's that the number of Blu-ray players – much less BD-Live capable players and BD-Live capable PCs in households today – is infinitesimal," said Tom Adams, a Monterey-based home entertainment media analyst who sees the format taking five years to come to fruition.

In addition, their previous album, "The Jonas Brothers," which has remained on the chart for more than a year, edged back into the Top 10, giving the group the distinction of being the first act in nine years to have two albums in the Top 10 simultaneously, according to Billboard. The last time it happened was during the heady peak of the boy band craze in 1999, when 'N Sync pulled it off.

First-week sales of "A Little Bit Longer" came in behind Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," which sold 1 million copies, and Coldplay's "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," which registered 721,000 in back to back weeks in June.

Finally, the Jonases figure prominently in the No. 8 album as well, the soundtrack to the Disney Channel movie "Camp Rock," which also experienced a slight sales increase last week.

After dinner reserved parade viewing of Disney's Electrical Parade

But it's not the 8 bushels of potatoes he's harvested that's making him proud.

It's what one tot that makes the crop so special. Rick brown dug up a potato that looks like Mickey mouse.

Brown says he's been planting potatoes for 30 years and has never seen anything like it. His neighbor and co-workers can't believe the likeness either.

Start by playing the Story Mode so that you can unlock all the features of the game. The Story Mode is playable on three levels of difficulty, a designation that applies to the minigames within the story.

There are three kinds of minigames: Performance, Cheetah Fashions and Gita Says. Once unlocked, these games are playable separate from the Story Mode.

The Performance games are music/rhythm games, similar to what was first introduced in "Elite Beat Agents," where you tap colored circles in time to the music. For example, while in India, The Cheetah Girls try out to be the opening act for a local Indian band. The girls are shown performing on the lower touch-sensitive screen and as they sing and dance, colored circles with numbers in the center appear on top of the singers. Each circle has a large ring around it that decreases in size until it matches the outline of the circle. If you tap the circle at the moment the ring matches the outline of the circle, you attain the maximum points possible and the singers keep performing. Miss too many of these, and the tryout stops. However, you can repeat the tryout until you succeed.

Cheetah Fashions is a memory game where you are shown an article of clothing and then asked to reproduce it in a limited time period. You select the pattern of clothing, the material and the flair (a small insignia placed on top of the item). For each article you create, you earn it and money to buy other clothing. With the Gita Says minigame, you must memorize dance moves by re-creating them with a sequence of arrows.

In addition to playing the game, players can use the DS to listen to the ten Cheetah Girls songs. If you plug in headphones, you can listen to the songs even when the DS is closed. The game also supports D-Gamer, an online community where you can chat with friends, see the achievements you have unlocked in Disney games, and create an avatar that can be seen by others as you chat.

In the Multiplayer Mode, the Performance minigames can be played cooperatively or competitively using the local wireless capability of the DS. If two friends own copies of the game, they can trade fashions they have made or bought.

While the game's shallow themes of fashion and pursuit of fame may cause some parents concern, the game does encourage players to read the story and two of the three minigames require players to practice memory skills. These minigames appear in variety of formats, are all fun to play and get progressively harder.

In March this year, Disney carried out another attempt, but this time in Japan, where the brand has been super-popular for decades now. Disney Japan teamed up with local telecom conglomerate SoftBank to become the country’s first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) offering both voice and data services.

In Japan, Disney strategically about-faced by pursuing an OEM-like strategy: They leave back-end operations (distribution, price planning, sales, billing, etc.) to their partner and focus on bringing content, design know-how and brand value into the partnership.

Japanese customers can sign up for Disney Mobile at over 2,000 SoftBank stores and buy jointly designed handsets featuring various Disney characters. Subscribers are able to download Disney cartoons, games or ringtones, jump to exclusive Disney web sites by pressing a dedicated button on their phones and use @disney.ne.jp as their mobile mail address. Another accommodation to local peculiarities: The main target customers in Japan aren’t kids but women in their 20s and 30s.

Landrieu and representatives of Walt Disney Co. will have a news conference Sept. 10 to officially announce Louisiana will be featured at a six-week, food and wine festival in Walt Disney World's Epcot Center.

An estimated 1.3 million people are expected to attend, said Stacy Brown, president of the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau.

Louisiana's week will come Oct. 19-25.

Brown went before the Bossier Police Jury this month to ask for $5,000 to contribute to the festival.

The Police Jury already had decided to chip in twice that amount for a regional film initiative that had fallen through, and Brown was asking permission to use the $5,000 for something else.

Brown declined further comment until the news conference.

As part of the deal, Bossier Parish gets to send one representative, which Parish Administrator and Police Juror Bill Altimus said he thought would be Lisa Johnson, executive director of the Bossier Chamber of Commerce.

Never mind the Olympics. You don't have to be a tween to know that the Disney original movie "Camp Rock" was a sensation this summer, drawing some nine million viewers. Wanting to capitalize on the success, the network decided to put the full-length movie on Disney.com for one day, along with interactive features like the ability to chat with other viewers online, take polls and answer trivia questions.

With a window of 60 days to get the movie on the site, Disney's Interactive Media Group relied on a combination of virtualization, load balancing and content delivery networks (CDN). About 25 servers were provisioned for different parts of the architecture to balance the load of the anticipated increased traffic, says Bud Albers, CTO of the Interactive Media Group, in Seattle.

The group had done virtualization projects before, but never of this magnitude, Albers says. The strategy was to be able to scale server capacity up and down, depending on the demand, he says. Deploying a physical infrastructure was not a viable alternative. "There wasn't time to do it any other way,'' Albers says, since Disney had to gather requirements, features and content and then come up with a production schedule.

The goal, adds Adam Fritz, principal software engineer for the interactive media group, was to ensure capital and operating efficiencies as well as the ability to remain agile by relying upon virtual machines. "By taking a pool of equipment and dedicate it to the event, and move it around instead of having to go through a deployment and purchasing cycle makes us more agile," says Fritz, also in Seattle.

Other sites, including ABC news and ESPN are hosted out of the same facility, "so we were able to spread our load and use 25 different machines that weren't at a peak time. Basically by doing that, we were able to hold the peak load and there were no incremental capital costs," says Albers.

Disney.com also used "XD" features, a dynamically integrated environment incorporating video, games images and community elements, which are a part of the site. In order to provide a good user experience, the group relied upon two CDNs, Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks, to help meet the volume for multiple types of content delivery. Instead of having the user requests come in to Disney's group, they were sent to nearby CDN nodes, says Fritz.

"Using the CDN for large-scale assets like video delivery is the stated practice today no matter who you're talking to,'' says Albers. "CDN is the key component in that value chain. What we're adding to that is ability to measure and optimize the CDN as that market and service commoditize."

According to Disney's internal tracking, the site reached a daily record with 3.17 million visitors, increasing traffic to Disney.com by 37 percent on June 23. It received 860,000 video plays for the one-day event.

Albers says the day-long event allowed them to prove "beyond a shadow of a doubt" the scalability of a virtualization scheme, which will continue to be a huge advantage to them for future events where huge spikes in online traffic are anticipated, like during the presidential election. "Going forward we're now very well positioned to leverage growing this environment."