Dreamer will use the 2009 International CES to introduce prospective clients to its Biddle platform, which is designed to enable content producers to offer a range of IP entertainment capabilities through the BD-Live foundation of Blu-ray Disc profile 2.0 enabled players.
The company, which is based in Seoul, South Korea, and has offices in Burbank, Calif., calls its Biddle technology an interactive TV platform that enables content owners and distributors to deliver digital content and interactive services directly to a consumer’s TV using any Internet connected (BD-Live) Blu-ray Disc player.
Through Biddle-enabled players, the system gives content owners multiple “broadcasting channels” to send out content which end users will receive via residential broadband connections that do not require PCs, cable boxes or satellite decoders.
Some of the benefits of the system are quick disc startup times and the elimination of lengthy downloads to use the disc, as services are delivered from the Internet on a page-by-page basis.
Video delivered over the platform can be played back without having to wait for it to completely download, and it works with all BD-Live players including the PlayStation3.
The system is contained in a firmware file that uses less than 250kB of space and can be added to a player’s memory or be integrated into an IC chip with no build of materials cost.
Greg Lukins, Dreamer business development VP, said most other IPTV systems, such as those that provide connections to video-streaming providers, including Netflix, operate outside of the Blu-ray domain, while Biddle is available to any Blu-ray Profile 2.0 player.
“Our approach is much more of an IPTV solution. From a manufacturer’s perspective, by putting a little bit of client code in their player, they basically enable a portal to any content service’s content that is enabled to come in through that,” Lukins said.
The system will provide a service aggregation portal that looks like a screen full of icons that give consumer a visual channel guide for a range of applications from information services, commerce services, video services, widgets or anything one would want to deploy through a digital connection.
Dreamer will provide customers with servers to deploy that content or it can be delivered directly from the content provider’s server.
Lukin said authoring houses can utilize the Biddle API during the creation of Blu-ray discs to deliver to their customers Biddle capabilities.
The company is announcing that Technicolor, one of the world’s largest authoring houses, has signed on to use the Biddle system on discs they author for their content provider clients.
