Ligos Launches ETV/EBIF Version of its Mosaic Interactive Program Guide System

Savannah, Georgia-based digital video processing company, Ligos, announced Tuesday that it has developed an ETV/EBIF version of its Mosaic EPG (note: EBIF--short for "Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format"--is a CableLabs-backed specification that is designed to enable interactive TV applications to run on the low-resource legacy set-top boxes that have been widely deployed by US cable operators). The Mosaic EPG presents viewers with multiple thumbnails or "tiles" of live video streams on a single TV screen, and allows them to use their remotes to navigate to and highlight the individual tiles: when a tile is highlighted, its audio can be heard and viewers can click on it to view the channel it represents in full-screen mode. Mosaic EPG's are typically used by pay-TV operators to facilitate content discovery by presenting groups of similar channels--e.g., news, sports and children's channels--in a visually rich manner on a single screen; they can also incorporate advertising and service promotions. "Our new ETV Mosaic makes it possible for more providers to deliver this viewing experience to their subscribers," Ligos CEO, Mark Koziol, said in a prepared statement. "This is only the first of our plans for the EBIF platform. Further out we foresee incorporating personalized data feeds to further enhance Mosaic channels, and we're planning other compelling applications that will add value to the ETV experience for both providers and their subscribers."

According to Ligos, its Mosaic application has been integrated with EPG's from such companies as Macrovision, Microsoft and Cisco. The company says that the new ETV/EBIF version of the application "now opens this same video-rich experience to the 15 million EBIF-enabled subscriber set-top boxes planned for 2009, a number projected to double next year." It claims that the application has been "highly optimized" for the US cable industry's EBIF-enabled set-tops, in order to ensure that it loads quickly. It says that the app is compatible with ETV/EBIF user agents from BIAP and TVWorks.

Ligos bills its new ETV Mosaic as integrating all required functions--stream input, compositing, metadata, encoding EBIF and stream output--into a single, compact server platform. The company says it provides an easy-to-use graphical design environment that allows operators to create dynamic channel layouts and that "removes the complexity of the EBIF specification by automatically generating all of the audiovisual and navigational requirements of the resulting output channel." It claims that the ETV Mosaic is currently finishing qualification within "one of the nation's largest cable operators" and that it will be available to other operators in the near future.