M+E Daily
Giant Interactive Launches BD-Live Service
Story Highlights
Blu-ray and DVD producer Giant Interactive is marketing BD-Connect, a software solution for adding BD-Live interactivity to Blu-ray discs, to North American content owners under an exclusive partnership with European service provider Imagion AG.
Giant says BD-Connect, which has been used on more than 400 Blu-ray titles in Europe to date, is the easiest BD-Live technology to implement and comes pre-configured with more features than competing solutions.
“Blu-ray is well on its way to becoming DVD’s successor, and in addition to amazing high definition video and audio, one of the great features of the format is web interactivity,” says Jeff Stabenau, President, Giant Interactive. “BD-Connect offers the richest, most powerful BD-Live experience for consumers and content providers today.”
The technology, Giant says, is already a hit with European consumers and content producers, and it arrives in North America as a compelling and thoroughly proven gateway to customers and content.
BD-Connect works seamlessly with community-driven websites such as CBS-BDLive.com, Twitter and Facebook. Other noteworthy features include a highly scalable architecture with Akamai edge server content delivery, allowing for rapid loading of geo-targeted BD-Live components with full screen progressive streaming video, HD downloads, synched movie viewing experiences, user generated quizzes, trivia tracks, photo galleries, marketing banners, RSS feeds and menu widgets.
BD-Connect has also enjoyed critical acclaim from the Blu-ray community. Featured on Paramount Home Entertainment’s “Star Trek The Original Series” and “CSI” box sets, High-Def Digest called the technology “…one of the most useful and best implemented BD-Live features I’ve used to date,” while High-Def Disc News praised the “very sleek and fast interface,” and EngadgetHD declared “These implementations so far have been some of the best examples of the potential BD-Live holds that we keep hearing about, but rarely see.”
BD-Connect is currently featured on CBS/Paramount Home Entertainment’s recent “CSI Season 9” Blu-ray release, which takes users to criminology and forensics conferences in Denver and Las Vegas via BD-Live, showing how easily targeted content can be delivered to consumers. The platform is being spotlighted this week at the Blu-Con 2.0 media industry conference in Los Angeles.
