Today the official announcement came out and as promised on our previous post “Blu-ray Controlled by iPhones and iPods”. Here are some more details and quotes of key players from NetBlender about this exciting release.

“Having spent the past decade building interactive video products we are thrilled to bring together two of the most interactive consumer products ever created with BD Touch,” said John Harrington, NetBlender CEO. “We began R&D on integrating the two devices right after I experienced the iPhone Multi-Touch interface for the first time.” “Having spent the past decade building interactive video products we are thrilled to bring together two of the most interactive consumer products ever created with BD Touch,” said John Harrington, NetBlender CEO. “We began R&D on integrating the two devices right after I experienced the iPhone Multi-Touch interface for the first time.”

“We are pleased that NetBlender’s DoStudio, which incorporates Corel’s PureHD Multiplexing technology, is continuing to expand the creative possibilities for next generation media professionals,” said Jeff Hastings, President and GM Corel Digital Media.

“By releasing the BD Touch SDK to the iPhone developer community we’re excited to see creative possibilities for Blu-ray interactivity flourish,” said Denny Breitenfeld, NetBlender CTO. “The BD Touch framework is built into our Blu-ray disc authoring solution, DoStudio, so Blu-ray authorers at every level of the industry will be able to take advantage of these exciting new applications on their discs with point and click ease.”

Some implementations of BD Touch will include:

• Pushing digital copies of movies to an iPhone from the Blu-ray disc menu.
• Automatically cataloguing a viewer’s Blu-ray disc collection and providing movie suggestions
• Updating and managing a viewer’s rental queue
• Displaying trivia and extra information about a movie in sync with the movie’s playback
• Turning existing Blu-ray discs into games that use the iPhone as the game controller
• Viewing fan-created content in sync with the disc
• Receive audio and video from the Blu-ray Disc.
• Receive current information about the Blu-ray Disc that is playing such as the title’s name, the studio, the current audio and subtitle settings, the current chapter, and more.
• Send text messages to the Blu-ray Disc.
• Unlock hidden features on the disc.
• Send audio or video from the iPhone to the Blu-ray Disc.
• Send Blu-ray player commands such as “Fast Forward”.
• Receive URL commands from the Blu-ray Disc such as go to a specific website, or download an iTunes movie or song.

Click here: NetBlender’s website

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BD Touch is the name of the new technology that links Blu-ray content to Apple devices released by NetBlender. This will enable iPods touch and iPhones to “communicate” and exchange information with Blu-ray devices. Pretty exciting, huh? Hell yeah!!!! Very soon we will be able to control our Blu-ray devices with our little Apple gadgets, just like remotes.

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According to NetBlender the new technology will:

• Make the iPhone application able to interact directly with movies, showing extra information in the iPhone.
• Be able to keep a database of your movie collection.
• Be able to get digital copies of the movies inside the Blu-ray disc, presumably already encoded for iPod touch and iPhone playback.
• Enable instant interactivity including e-commerce and advertising.

The following is a quote from NetBlender:

“The sophisticated user interface of the iPhone enables greater user interaction as well as the power to leverage the iPhone’s existing network. 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,” the company states.“The key thing is that BD Touch is a two way communication technology, meaning BD Touch allows Blu-Ray discs to send and receive data from an iPhone/iPod Touch,” says Denny Breitenfeld, NetBlender’s CTO. “The data can be images, text, audio, video and what we call Player commands like fast forward. This technology is going to be built into our professional Blu-Ray authoring tool so studios can take advantage of it, and we are releasing an SDK so developers can create all kinds of applications for consumer.”

At this moment, there are a lot of details missing and many questions unanswered. We will have to wait until Thursday (April 10^th) when the official announcement comes and see if it will clarify some of everyone’s question marks…

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