Finnish Interactive TV Company, Icareus, Acquires Innosonic China

Helsinki-based interactive TV company, Icareus (note: the company's offerings include a range of authoring and delivery solutions for MHP, OCAP/tru2way, MHEG and other platforms, as well as an extensive catalog of off-the-shelf interactive TV games and other applications), said Wednesday that it has acquired Shanghai-based Innosonic Information Technology, a subsidiary of Finnish mobile company, Innosonic. According to Icareus, the deal means that it now owns all Innosonic China's products and rights. "The acquisition strengthens our capabilities to serve our Chinese customers and tap into the opportunity in the mobile industry and IPTV, which both are growing rapidly in China," Icareus director, Mikko Karppinen, said in a prepared statement. "The Jukebox platform gives us a robust mobile content delivery platform and I am really enthusiastic about the video-ringtone technology, which provides us completely new business with operators and advertisers. With the help of our new business entity in China and leading Icareus solutions, we will announce some major new business deals this summer."

Although Icareus says that it has been working in China for two years now, it says that one of the reasons it acquired Innosonic China was that it needed a stronger local presence in that country. It plans to focus on two business areas in China: IPTV applications and services and interactive mobile services. The company says that part of its IPTV application-development operation will be moved to China, and that it will continue development of Innosonic China's mobile technology and use the latter's Jukebox platform to deliver mobile video content to end-users.

In other recent news from Icareus:
--In March, the company announced that its Icareus Studios content-production arm had released a new portfolio of interactive TV casual games, targeted at browser-based IPTV environments (note: the company also offers SMS-based participation TV games, and Java-based interactive TV games for digital terrestrial, cable, satellite and IPTV environments). According to the company, the new portfolio includes some of its existing Java-based ITV games that have been ported to a browser environment, as well as some new games. All the games are single-player; however, the company says it will launch multi-player games for browser-based IPTV environments later this year.
--In February, the company announced that it had formed a multi-level strategic alliance with SysMedia, a UK-based provider of subtitling solutions and content management and production systems for interactive TV and teletext. According to the companies, the deal calls for Icareus to integrate its playout solutions for MHP, tru2way, DVB-H (mobile TV) and MHEG-5 with SysMedia's SysMedia Gold multiplatform content production and management system, and also to resell SysMedia's WinCAPS subtitling products in Latin America, through its sales offices in Uruguay and Mexico. "For our customers, the benefits of this cooperation are clear: a closely integrated end-to-end solution for new digital text-based services and other interactive TV applications, backed up by comprehensive market experience," SysMedia CEO, Andrew Lambourne, said in a prepared statement. "With broadcasters across the world looking for competitive advantage, interactive TV is a proven way of achieving increased brand penetration and this alliance makes those opportunities truly accessible."
--Also in February, the company announced various updates for its mobile TV products. It said that its Icareus Playout ES100 ESG Server (acts as an aggregation server for collecting ESG metadata from external sources, and feeds the output it generates to an external IP encapsulator in IPDC, OMA-BCAST or OAI) and its Icareus Playout PC200 Compact (provides free-to-air broadcast services over DVB-H networks) had been the recipient of several improvements, including support for OMA-BCAST and interactivity; and that its Icareus iTV Suite 4 Mobile (consists of Author, a WYSIWYG authoring tool for creating TV-centric mobile Java apps that utilize DVB-H or 3G networks, for example through a JSR-272 API; Player for Participation TV, a video-rendering engine for broadcasting interactive TV applications; and iTV Suite Manager, a backend solution for managing interactions in DVB-H, which includes a scheduler, turnkey applications and traffic monitoring) had been integrated with its Icareus Playout products to offer full management of interactivity in both broadcast and unicast mobile TV networks. The company says that its Playout and iTV Suite offerings are tightly integrated, but offer Java and XML API's for third parties.