Testing

itaas, an Atlanta-based company that provides a range of software development, integration and testing services for interactive TV (including ETV/EBIF, tru2way and IPTV solutions), announced Wednesday that it has secured an agreement with Cisco that designates it as the source for ongoing enhancements to and support for the existing Scientific-Atlanta Resident Application (SARA) viewing guide for Cisco's Explorer set-top box platform.

Kudelski-owned interactive TV and advanced advertising technology provider, OpenTV, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Coverity, a provider of "software integrity" solutions, that it says will complement its middleware testing environment.

Video monitoring technology provider, Volicon, has launched an Interactive Services Module (ISM) for the Observer RPM (Remote Program Manager), its post set-top box video service assurance solution for cable, IPTV, mobile and satellite service providers. According to the company, the new ISM extends the Observer RPM with capabilities that allow operators to test the quality of their on-demand and interactive TV content and advertising alongside their linear TV offerings.

Softel, a UK-based company that claims to have over 25 years of experience in providing ancillary data solutions--including solutions for interactive TV, opt cuing/ad insertion, subtitling and captioning--to leading broadcasters and service providers across the world (note: for an in-depth overview of Softel and its work in the interactive TV space, see the interview with its CEO, Sam Pemberton, that was published on itvt.com, July 31st), on Monday announced a joint initiative with Telecommunications Support Services (TSS) to offer comprehensive testing services for developers of interactive TV applications.

US cable-industry research, development and standardization consortium, CableLabs, announced Thursday the alpha version of a new Enhanced TV (ETV) Test Suite, which is intended to support ETV user agent development (note: ETV user agents are the software components that process an ETV application on a set-top box). Based on the CableLabs Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) specification, the test suite is comprised of a set of test EBIF applications, a test plan, and test controller software (complete with source code).