Technology

Advanced advertising technology provider, BlackArrow, announced Tuesday that its VOD ad insertion platform has gone live with Comcast in Jacksonville, Florida.

Cliqset, a company which has developed a platform for sharing, discovering and discussing content with social-network friends around the Web, on Tuesday launched a real-time conversation application for Boxee's over-the-top-TV platform. Cliqset's platform is designed to tie together over 70 different social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Flickr and Yelp, into "activity streams" that users can share with their friends and to social networks, and thereby to enable real-time communication across those networks and around specific events in users' activity streams.

Rovi (formerly Macrovision--for more on the company's name change and the repositioning it heralds, see the interview with Rovi chief evangelist, Richard Bullwinkle, that was published on itvt.com, July 16th) said Tuesday that triple-play provider, RCN, has renewed a multi-year agreement to license Rovi's Passport Guide software, applications and television data. RCN recently went 100% digital in its Boston, Chicago, metro Washington DC, New York and Pennsylvania markets, and a set-top box is now needed to receive its programming.

Comcast Media Center (CMC), a business unit of the eponymous MSO that provides centralized content-management and distribution solutions for cable systems, video content providers and advertisers, said Tuesday that it has been tapped by US Spanish-language broadcaster, Univision Communications, to manage distribution of its Univision On Demand VOD service, which features content from Univision Communications' three linear networks, Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision. CMC claims that its national VOD platform reaches over 35 million VOD-enabled households and offers rapid-turn capabilities for acquiring and encoding linear TV programs, such as live sports events, providing near-real-time delivery to local VOD servers.

Veeple, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that specializes in interactive online video solutions for marketers (note: for an in-depth overview of the company's products and strategy, see the interview with its co-founder and CEO, Scott Broomfield, that was published on itvt.com, April 22nd), has developed an interactive API and plug-in, called interPlay, which it says will allow users to add Veeple interactive functionality to their existing, third-party online video player.

Electra Entertainment--a company that was founded in early 2003 by Static 2358 founder, Jasper Smith, and former Gemstar-TV Guide CTO, Jonathan Drazin (note: Smith serves as its CEO and Drazin as its CTO; its chairman is former BT and BSkyB director, John Swingewood)--on Monday provided a few more details about its flagship Trove interactive TV technology.

Patrick Barry--VP of connected TV at Yahoo!, who has become the public face of that company's OTT/TV widget efforts (note: in January, the company announced deals for its TV widget platform with TV manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony and Vizio)--is leaving the company "to move on to new projects and aspirations." The following email from Barry, in which he announces to his staff that he will resign his position at the end of the month, was obtained Monday by TechCrunch:

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TellyTopia contacted [itvt] Monday to let us know that its flagship i2TV service (note: the name stands for "Internet-to-TV") is now available in the San Francisco Bay Area on local digital broadcaster KAXT's Channel ONE (1-8) service.

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

In a posting on a BBC blog, Monday, Richard Halton, director of Project Canvas--the joint over-the-top venture between the BBC, ITV, Five and BT, that seeks to develop a common standard and interface for the delivery of online catch-up services such as the BBC iPlayer and the ITV player, as well as other Internet-based VOD services, to broadband-connected set-top boxes--responded to the criticisms that were levied at the project by BSkyB in a new submission to the BBC's governing body, the BBC Trust (note: Sky's submission, which was the subject of an article in Monday's Financial Times, is available