A company called Netblender has announced that it is developing a SDK to allow the iPhone and iPod Touch to interact with a range of Blu-ray players, including the one in the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console. The SDK, BD Touch, makes use the iPhone's Wi-Fi capabilities and some networking technology built into Blu-ray players.

"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," Breitenfeld said.

The technology will work both ways, also allowing Blu-ray players to control the iPhone and iPod touch. This means that the iPhone will "sense" which movie you are watching and could display relevant information, such as that found in online movie databases.

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
* 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

"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.

The iPhone's geo location features, 3D sensors and QWERTY keyboard will all be great advantages in developing Blu-ray-oriented applications, and the SDK can make use of all of them.

Netblender is not at its first innovative solution for multimedia applications. In the company statement, Jeff Hastings, President and GM at Corel Digital Media, has said that his company is very pleased with NetBlender's DoStudio, which incorporates Corel's PureHD Multiplexing technology. DoStudio is a complete BD-ROM spec authoring application with BD multiplexing, BDCMF formatting, AACS encapsulation and more.