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In an interview with Bloomberg News that was published Wednesday, Anthony Wood, CEO of over-the-top company, Roku, revealed that the company hopes to raise $30 million in private funding this quarter from Menlo Ventures and other sources, and that it may go public next year--though he added that it is not currently working with an investment bank and has yet to set a date for an IPO.

A number of companies last week announced plans to offer interactive TV applications on supported Samsung HDTV's, Blu-ray players and Home Theater Systems through Samsung's recently updated Internet@TV over-the-top (OTT) platform, and its newly announced Samsung Apps app store service (note: for more on the latter, see the article published on itvt.com, January 7th). They include:

Cloud-based interactive TV specialist, ActiveVideo Networks, announced Wednesday that it has appointed consumer electronics industry veteran, Henry Choy, as VP of business development, tasking him with leading a new strategic initiative to bring its CloudTV platform to consumer electronics devices (note: ActiveVideo's efforts to penetrate the cable industry appear to be enjoying some success--for more on the company's work with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, see the interview wit

Swarmcast, a Minneapolis-based live online video streaming company (note: the company is best known for delivering live streaming sports coverage; its clients include Major League Baseball, CBS College Sports and Raycom Sports), today announced that it is launching an HD-enabled live streaming video platform for consumer electronics devices.

Semiconductor company, Broadcom, announced Monday that LG Electronics has integrated its Bluetooth technology into its new LH70 line of digital television sets (which are now shipping), thus allowing consumers to connect those sets to devices such as wireless stereo headphones and--more interestingly--mobile phones. According to Broadcom, its Bluetooth technology will allow the new LG TV sets to act as wireless docking stations for MP3-enabled mobile phones and portable media players, thus enabling music and other audio to play over TV speaker systems. In January, Broadcom announced a deal to integrate its Bluetooth technology with TV sets from Sharp.

The DVB Project, an international standards consortium comprised of around 280 broadcasters, network operators, vendors, regulatory bodies and other TV industry players, announced Monday that it has begun a "study mission" on Internet TV content delivery, that will investigate technology options for delivering what it describes as "DVB-type content" over the Internet to a broad range of consumer electronics devices, including game consoles, mobile devices and PC's. While the study mission will focus primarily on content delivery, the DVB says, it will also explore other aspects of Internet TV delivery, including codecs, security and metadata.

Studio-backed subscription-free broadband/personalized TV service, ZillionTV (note: for an in-depth overview of the company, see [itvt]'s recent interview with its CEO, Mitch Berman, in Issue 8.33), has announced a content agreement with indie studio, The Weinstein Company.

Consumer electronics giants, Philips, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic,
announced last week that they are collaborating on the development of
a standardized specification for radio frequency-based remote controls
for audio-visual consumer electronics devices. Together with Freescale
Semiconductors, OKI and Texas Instruments, the companies have
formed an RF4CE (stands for "Radio Frequency for Consumer
Electronics") Consortium that will attempt to create a new protocol to

enable the development of radio frequency remote controls that offer
richer communication, increased reliability and more flexible use.