San Francisco — BD-Live software and content developer the Related Content Database (RCDb) said Thursday it is expanding its work beyond Hollywood movie community to add BD-Live features to Nortel phones.
The functionality, which Nortel is calling “the Video Bulletin Board,” will allow users to send a photo or video from their mobile phone to their own or a friend’s BD-Live-enabled Blu-ray device. Then, using the remote, the viewer can activate a click-to-call feature that would automatically have the phone call the mobile user who sent the photo.
“The studios are definitely getting into the whole picture mail idea with BD-Live, but this is a kind of cool user-generated example that shows off how the BD player can become a communication device as well as an entertainment one,” according to a RCDb spokesperson.
The functionality will be showcased at this week’s TelcoTV ‘08 conference in Anaheim, Calif.
Also at the event, Nortel is showing a variety of applications that meld TV programming with mobile devices, from text messaging and sharing personal photos and videos, to VoIP calling while viewing TV or video-on-demand.
Nortel’s IPTV solutions also allow users to take TV content out of the house to be viewed on a mobile phone or laptop.
“Nortel’s video solutions can take service providers beyond bundling of services to true convergence of entertainment and interactive applications,” stated Sameer Sheth, video solution general manager, Nortel. “Nortel allows service providers to create a more personalized and convenient user experience for their subscribers where any device can be used for a multitude of functions. For example, a TV, computer or mobile phone can be used to watch video-on-demand from a single account. A TV can be used to order a pizza, buy tickets to an event or share photos with friends.”
Nortel’s IPTV solutions will be used to bring enhanced entertainment to subscribers by such customers as Spruce Knob Seneca Rocks, a telecom service provider in West Virginia; BIT, a service provider in Virginia; and Yadkin Valley Telecom, an operator serving more than 30,000 households in North Carolina.
Both Spruce Knob Seneca Rocks and BIT will deploy Nortel’s Communications Module 9520 to bring new interactive applications such as click-to-call, text messaging and picture sharing to their television subscribers. Yadkin Valley Telecom is implementing Nortel’s pre-integrated IPTV Solution to provide a secure, reliable, scalable high-definition entertainment service.
Nortel said its work with RCDb and others will give service providers the ability to leverage a multitude of different devices — TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, computers, mobile phones — in an open environment to create new services and applications designed to generate additional revenues from their network investment.
To help service providers meet this additional bandwidth demands created by the new applications, Nortel said it offers an Ethernet Access solution based on WDM PON technology to provide fast, secure and reliable optical bandwidth starting with speeds of 100Mbps and scalable as services grow.
