PlayStation 3 To Get iPhone/iTouch Compatibility

Just yesterday I was thinking to myself how utterly feature filled the PlayStation 3 is. It's not even a matter of debate, there is nothing out there that can do as many things as the PlayStation 3, especially not for its price. Soon, you'll be able to add yet another feature to the PS3's never-ending repertoire: iPhone and iTouch compatibility. But for clarity's sake, this feature is actually for all Blu-ray players, but we'll refer to the PlayStation 3 as an example.

NetBlender will be announcing a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone that will allows developers to utilize the PlayStation 3's Blu-ray playback. It's called BD Touch, and NetBlender's official website already has the necessary details up for you to check out. This software will allow iPhone and iTouch owners to use their devices as either devices that interact with the Blu-ray movie you're currently watching, or even "beam" an iTunes digital copy movie onto your device and let you watch it in the palm of your hand.

Tech site Gizmodo recently spoke to the guys at Netblender, and have offered a few choice quotes: "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," Denny Breitenfeld, the CTO of NetBlender, told Gizmodo. "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."

"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," he explained. "The ideas are only limited to what people want and will use."

By "player commands", that also means your handheld wonder can also double as a remote control. The device detects what movie your watching and you're given all of these options and abilities to perform. And if we understand correctly, if you're watching Blu-ray 2.0 movies that support BD Live, you can access that extra BD Live content via iPhone/iTouch, as well.

Weirdly enough, NetBlender also claims that they this software will also allow the PlayStation 3 to control the handhelds, too. We're not quite sure how that'll work, but we're curious. The SDK will be able to all 100,000+ registered iPhone developers, so hopefully we see lots of strides made with it. The official announcement is expected this Thursday. In the meantime, visit the website and take a look at the bullet points below.

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

4/10/2008 Arnold Katayev

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