Blu-ray technology takes features to mobiles

App for iPhone, BlackBerry, others launching next week

By Jennifer Netherby -- Video Business, 4/17/2009

APRIL 17 | Blu-ray is about to go mobile.

BluFocus and NetBlender will debut an updated mobile app for the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphones next week that will allow Blu-ray owners to transfer bonus and interactive features directly from their BD discs and players to phones.

The tech companies will show off the BD Touch 2.0 app to the industry at the NAB conference Tuesday, but studios and hardware manufacturers are already showing interest, BluFocus founder and CEO Paulette E. Pantoja said.

The app, which will be available for free at the iTunes store beginning this weekend, works on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, the Palm Pre, Google Android and BlackBerry. With it, consumers can transfer downloadable content and interactive features from their Blu-ray Disc to their phone. The phones also can be used as a remote control for a compatible Blu-ray player.

Blu-ray developers and consumer electronics companies have to add the BD Touch capability to discs and players to allow consumers to transfer content. “It’s just one line of code they have to put in,” Pantoja said. “We made it extremely, extremely simple.”

Backers say they intend BD Touch to be an affordable and simple add-on for developers. BD player manufacturers can add the capability through a firmware upgrade so the function can be added to players already in consumer homes. BD Touch backers say the mobile interactivity will help further set the format apart from DVD and make it more appealing to a younger audience that uses mobile phones more and more.

“There was a huge difference between VHS to DVD,” Pantoji said. “What’s the difference between DVD and Blu-ray? Right now, people just see high-definition (as the difference), and you have these two major other possibilities—BD-J and BD Live—you can do. We think and feel that this is it.”