vcommerce

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 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:

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.

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 (

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.

Delivery Agent, a company that specializes in developing what it calls "shopping-enabled" entertainment (i.e.

UK high-street retailer, Marks & Spencer, says that its interactive broadband video service, Marks & Spencer TV (http://www.marksandspencer.tv), which launched around six months ago, has now delivered over a million minutes of video. According to the company, the service's player, which was developed by Adjust Your Set, has hosted over 190 "films," including interviews with such celebrities as Zandra Rhodes, Twiggy and Marie Helvin, documentaries, catwalk footage, Marks & Spencer TV spots, and "customer vox pops."

UPDATE: After we went to press, Ooyala contacted [itvt] to let us know that
the launch of "POV Reviews," which was expected to take place today, has
been temporarily delayed.

HSN, the home shopping network, which has long been a pioneer in adopting new technologies (its Shop-by-Remote interactive TV application, for example, launched on Oceanic Time Warner Cable in early 2006), announced Monday the launch of a free iPhone/iPod touch application, which it bills as enabling it to offer the ecommerce industry's first "live-video 3-screen experience." According to the company, the new application, which is available for download in both the iTunes App Store and on its own HSN.com Web site, offers "all the engaging highlights" provided by the linear-TV and broadband video versions of its service.