iPhone/iPod Touch to Interact with Blu-Ray Players through BD Touch

NetBlender has announced BD touch, a new technology that will enable iPhone and iPod touch users to control their Blu-ray players. Denny Breitenfeld, the CTO of NetBlender, told gizmodo.com that what they're offering is far more than just a standalone app, but a package containing a professional Blu-Ray authoring tool complete with an SDK for iPhone developers. Allegedly, users will be able to interact directly with movies, see extra information in the iPhone and apparently even make iTunes purchases based on advertising related to movie content.

"It's a technology that is built into our professional Blu-Ray authoring tool that will allow studios, independent movie companies to enable BD Touch features. These features send data in two directions from the Disc to the Iphone and vice versa. Video, Audio, text, and player commands can be sent," Breitenfeld told Gizmodo.

Here comes the good part: "So right now it seems everyone likes the 'remote control' idea," Breitenfeld continued. "However the player can control the IPhone as well. One idea is to automatically pull up IMBD of the movie you are watching right on your Iphone or send the movie information a movie database on your phone. The ideas are only limited to what people want and will use," he claims.

NetBlender is releasing an SDK for the iPhone developer community (estimated at 100k) "so they can take advantage of BD Touch features to build applications that easily work with all kinds of titles," the company's CTO added.

NetBlender claims that the final iPhone app using BD touch tech will be able to interact directly with movies, showing extra information in the iPhone, keeping a database of your movie collection and even getting digital copies of the movies inside the Blu-ray disc. The aforementioned source notes that they are likely going to be encoded for iPod touch and iPhone playback.

The only problem we see with BD Touch is the quote they gave to MacWorld UK:

MacWorld UK also scored an interview with Denny Breitenfeld. They also got some extra information out of NetBlender's CTO: "The sophisticated user interface of the iPhone enables greater user interaction as well as the power to leverage the iPhone's existing network," Breitenfeld said. "Search, e-commerce and advertising possibilities related to movie content abound when one imagines real-time communication between the iPhone and the content currently being displayed on a Blu-ray player."

It has been hinted that users will be given the possibility to buy standalone content (such as a movie's soundtrack) while their Blu-ray movie is running.

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