[itvt] is pleased to present "EBIF Intensive," a special one-day workshop/dialog event that will take place in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 5th, the day after The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd and 4th).

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

The Open IPTV Forum (OIPF)--an industry group that is attempting to bring together telcos, consumer electronics manufacturers, and network infrastructure providers, in order to develop specifications for an open, end-to-end solution that will facilitate development and deployment of interactive, personalized IPTV services (note: the organization, whose founding members include Ericsson, FT Group, Nokia Siemens, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony and Telecom Italia, recently published the Architecture Specification for IPTV infrastructure elements and services to be included in Release 2 of its OIPF Specifications--see the article published on itvt.com, September 8th

Dick Clark Productions (DCP) contacted [itvt] Wednesday to let us know that it is teaming with Facebook (which, according to new figures from Nielsen's VideoCensus, is now the third-largest broadband video site after YouTube and Hulu in total streams) to add a live, interactive broadband video element to its annual American Music Awards (AMA).

Rockville, Maryland-based Hillcrest Labs contacted [itvt] Tuesday to let us know that it has been named an International CES Innovations 2010 Design and Engineering Awards Honoree for its flagship product, the Loop pointer.

[itvt] can today reveal the winners of the Mediaroom Application Contest that Microsoft held at its 3rd Annual Mediaroom Developers Conference last month (note: Mediaroom is Microsoft's IPTV platform, which the company says has now been deployed in over 4 million subscriber households worldwide, by a customer base that includes AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom and Portugal Telecom, among others).

-the-top-TV specialist, Boxee, has set the dates for the release of the beta version of its platform. The initial release will take place at 7:00PM on December 7th, at an unveiling event at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York City. According to the company, the event will also see the launch of various new applications from its partners, and will kick off "a 4-weeks early access for users to test the Beta" before it is officially released to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, January 7th.

InteractiveTV Today [itvt], the first, best and most widely read news source on interactive and multiplatform television, is pleased to present the fourth annual

TV of Tomorrow Show,

The American Film Institute Digital Content Lab, an organization which for more than a decade has played a key role in fostering the development of interactive and multiplatform TV--and interactive media in general--in the US, will hold its annual interactive media showcase, the AFI DigiFest (formerly known as the AFI Digital Content Festival), at the Mann Chinese Theater (auditorium #1) in Hollywood, November 4th and 5th.

[itvt] has just published interviews with senior executives from 1) BlackArrow, an advanced advertising specialist which announced earlier this week that its VOD ad-insertion platform--which enables ads to be inserted into VOD content on-the-fly--has gone live with Comcast in Jacksonville, Florida; and 2) Hoodlum, an alternate reality gaming (ARG) specialist which recently won a primetime Emmy for "The Dharma Initiative: Dharma Wants You," an ARG it created for the ABC

[itvt] has just published an in-depth interview with Stuart Waite, head of interactive media at Alcatel-Lucent, and Mark Janes, the director of business development and marketing for the company's Digital Media and Advertising Product division.

Because of the large volume of news generated by the ongoing IBC show in Amsterdam, and because the [itvt] editorial team is currently traveling in the UK, we are covering a number of this issue's news stories in round-up/summary form. We anticipate some additional interruption of our regular news publishing schedule in the coming days, so we apologize in advance for any inconvenience to our readers. Here is the round-up:

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has revealed the winners of the Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media.

The 61st Primetime Emmy Awards will feature an interactive element this year. Starting today, viewers can go to a dedicated area of CBS's TV.com Web site (http://www.tv.com/breakthrough) to cast their vote for the "Breakthrough Performance of the Year" from clips of 15 performances that are available to view on the site. On Monday, September 14th, the field will be narrowed down to 10, and then the top three performances will be revealed during the September 20th Primetime Emmy's telecast on CBS, with the winner being announced at the end of the show. Voting will continue during the telecast itself.

ActiveVideo Networks (formerly ICTV), a San Jose, Calif.-based company which offers a platform that it bills as intelligently streaming both traditional and Web-based content to digital set-top boxes and Web-connected CE devices and as combining the personalized, dynamic socially connected experience of the Web with the quality, immediacy and remote-control navigation that end-users expect from television (note: the platform, which earlier this year ActiveVideo announced had been deployed by Oceanic Time Warner Cable, and which is also believed to be in the process of being deployed by Cablevision--