commerce

In a posting on over-the-top-TV specialist Boxee's corporate blog, Wednesday, CEO Avner Ronen announced that the company plans to release a payment platform this summer that will allow users to purchase content "with one click on the remote." According to Ronen, the content partners the service will launch with (note: Ronen did not identify them) will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously unavailable to Boxee users, and will be able to package and price their content "as they wish," including offering it on a pay-per-view or subscription basis.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

In an interview with Steve Donohue of Cable Digital News, David Kline, president and COO of MSO Cablevision's Rainbow Advertising Sales unit, has stressed the importance of tcommerce to the MSO, confirming that it plans to roll out tcommerce capabilities next year. "We're going to pursue it vigorously," Kline said. "Being able to buy things off the TV is as much a consumer product as it is an advertising product. You're going to see a lot more of it." Kline did not, however, elaborate on how Cablevision plans to fulfill orders generated by its planned tcommerce service.

Sonic Solutions, the digital media company that last year acquired the pioneering broadband VOD service, CinemaNow (it subsequently added "Roxio" to the service's name in order to make its branding consistent with its other products), announced a deal last week to incorporate verve-media's interactive commerce functionality into the Roxio CinemaNow platform.

Boston-based interactive TV advertising specialist, Backchannelmedia, announced Tuesday that it has signed a deal with regional cable operator, Knology, that will see the latter testing Backchannelmedia's flagship Clickable TV technology on its digital cable network.

The US's largest cable MSO, Comcast, and home shopping network, HSN, on Wednesday announced that they have begun the nationwide roll-out of an ETV/EBIF version of HSN's flagship interactive TV application, Shop by Remote, which allows viewers to use their remote controls to shop and make purchases (note: the roll-out has actually been underway for some time now--see the article published on itvt.com, June 3rd).

In a corporate blog posting, Wednesday, Verizon's director of external communications, Bobbi Henson, announced that the company has partnered with home shopping network, HSN, to create a new widget version of the latter's Shop by Remote interactive TV application for the Verizon FiOS TV platform (note: Comcast has just announced the national roll-out of an EBIF version of Shop by Remote--see the article in this issue). The new widget will feature a "deal of the day" exclusively for FiOS TV customers, Henson said.

Interactive TV applications provider, icueTV, and Comcast Media Center (CMC) will today announce an agreement to deploy a full suite of icueTV's tcommerce applications on CMC's HITS AxIS platform. (Note: HITS AxIS--whose name stands for "Headend In The Sky Advanced Interactive Services," and which was developed in collaboration with Vidiom and TVWorks--is a centralized platform that operates on the NAS and DAC headend-management platforms and that is designed to facilitate the deployment and management of ETV/EBIF and OCAP/tru2way applications on cable systems serving small- to mid-sized markets.

Here is a round-up of some other interactive TV-related stories we didn't have room for in this issue:

Overlay.TV--an Ottawa, Canada-based start-up which has developed technology that, among other things, allows users to add a layer of custom-designed, clickable content over broadband videos, and which recently announced (see the article published on itvt.com, September 28th) that it would focus its efforts on Overlay.TV for Retail, the interactive video commerce platform that it launched in June (

Over-the-top-TV company, Roku (note: the company recently launched two new set-top boxes--see the article published on itvt.com, October 28th), on Sunday night announced the launch of the Roku Channel Store, together with 10 channels, all of which are offered free of charge to customers who want to add them to their Roku menu.

Comcast's advertising sales arm, Comcast Spotlight, on Wednesday announced a new service, called Video Circulars On Demand, which takes retailers' print advertising materials--including weekly newspaper inserts ("circulars"), display ads and catalogs--and converts them into on-demand video slideshows.

AdMob--a mobile advertising network which, earlier this month, was acquired by Google for $750 million--on Tuesday announced the launch of a new Interactive Video Ad Unit for the iPhone. The company claims that the new ad unit is "the first to bring true interactivity to mobile video advertising" via in-player actions that enable consumers to browse Web sites, view additional videos and more while the video they were watching plays.

Interactive marketing company, Zugara, and RichRelevance, a company that specializes in personalization and product-recommendation tools for ecommerce sites, on Monday announced the launch of a new, augmented reality-driven "social shopping" application, called "Fashionista," that they describe as combining "the benefits of the fitting room with the convenience of online shopping and the power of the social Web." The app, which is initially being offered by fashion retailer, Tobi.com, is billed by the companies as combining augmented reality, motion capture and real-time personalization in order to create a "more social and intuitive" way to shop for clothes on the Web.

TiVo announced Tuesday that movie rental chain Blockbuster's Blockbuster On Demand service can now be accessed over-the-top on broadband-connected TiVo Series2, TiVo Series3, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL DVR's. A deal between TiVo and Blockbuster was first announced in March.