cablelabs

Ligos--a Savannah, Georgia-based interactive TV company that says its goal is to "extend standards-based video processing technology in order to deliver highly personalized video services over open platforms"--contacted [itvt] Wednesday to let us know that it will be demo'ing its ETV Mosaic system at next week's CableLabs Winter Conference in Denver as part of the conference's EBIF Ecosystem area. The company bills ETV Mosaic as a visual EBIF authoring and playout system that provides tools for creating and delivering rich interactive content to subscribers, and that is targeted at multichannel operators, content owners and solutions providers that have adopted the CableLabs EBIF spec (enables interactive TV applications on limited-resource legacy set-top boxes).

Clearleap, an Atlanta-based company which offers a technology platform for bringing Internet-sourced video content to television sets, and FourthWall Media, the interactive TV technology company formerly known as BIAP (note: for more on the company's rebranding, see the article published on itvt.com, October 26th), will today announce that they have partnered to create a video-centric, unbound EBIF interactive weather application featuring content from The Weather Channel.

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 will be covering most stories in summary/round-up form over the next few weeks. Here is a round-up of recent news in various categories:

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:

[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).

As was widely anticipated, 3D TV has emerged as one of the major themes of this year's Consumer Electronics Show--and a number of pieces of 3D TV news came across [itvt]'s desk, Tuesday. Here is a brief round-up:

Geneva-based set-top box company, Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB), announced today that it has demonstrated live that it can "deliver the promise of tru2way for cable system operators and consumers." According to the company, at a recent CableLabs Interop event it showed how its ADB-4820C HD set-top box can seamlessly support the full functionality of both Cisco and Motorola tru2way headends and CableCARDs: the box was first connected to a Cisco headend using a Cisco CableCARD, and displayed Time Warner Cable's TV channels and tru2way interactive guide.

Kudelski-owned interactive TV and advanced advertising technology provider, OpenTV, and network video processing specialist, RGB Networks, have provided some information on their activities at the Advanced Advertising 1.0 Platform Interoperability event that US cable-industry research-and-development body, CableLabs, held last month (note: for more on the Interop event, see the article published on itvt.com, November 18th).

US cable-industry research, development and standardization body, CableLabs, issued a press release last week trumpeting the various ETV/EBIF and tru2way-related programs it has put in place to support device manufacturers and application developers--two groups which it describes as "important stakeholders" in the ETV and tru2way communities. "These steps that CableLabs is taking provide resources for tru2way and ETV product developers, at little to no cost for them," CableLabs president and CEO, Paul Liao, said in a prepared statement. "We will continue to review this area and discuss other opportunities with our members and developers in order to help move this technology into the market."

OpenTV, This Technology, Sigma Systems and Arris announced Monday that they are jointly demonstrating an integrated advertising inventory management solution for the first time at the CableLabs Summer Conference this week. According to the companies, the solution provides a comprehensive view and unprecedented management and control of advanced advertising inventory. This, they say, will allow operators to make much smarter decisions and gain a competitive advantage by having enhanced visibility into and detail about the advanced advertising inventory they have to sell, regardless of region and platform and regardless of whether units are interactive or timeshifted.

Ericsson-owned Tandberg Television announced Friday that it will debut what it is calling the "cable industry's first device-aware backoffice for multiplatform TV" at this week's CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone, CO, and at next month's IBC show in Amsterdam.

[itvt] has just published audio interviews with Keval Desai, director of product management at Google and head of the company's Google TV Ads operation; and with Eddie Young and Pete Docherty, CEO and CTO res

US cable-industry research, development and standardization organization, CableLabs, announced Wednesday the release of a new set of specifications, called the Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (SaFI), which it says were created to further the development of advanced cable advertising and other interactive products, and which will be a key part of Project Canoe, the US cable-industry's initiative to create a national, cross-operator, unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications have conceded that they will not--as they had promised in a supposedly binding MOU with various consumer electronics/hardware manufacturers that was announced last spring--have tru2way technology deployed across their entire service footprints by July 1st, according to a report Tuesday by Todd Spangler in the US cable-industry trade publication, Multichannel News.

enableTV, the interactive TV software and services company that was spun out of Vidiom Systems last year by Vidiom founder, Tim Wahlers, announced Thursday that it is offering a tru2way/OCAP deployment solution that includes a royalty-free, commercial version of CableLabs' recently launched tru2way Reference Implementation (note: the latter is an open source implementation of CableLabs' OCAP middleware specification that is billed as providing device manufacturers and application developers with a consistent interpretation of the spec; it was re