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[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).

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:

The US's largest cable MSO, Comcast, and home shopping network, HSN, on Wednesday announced that they have begun the nationwide roll-out of an ETV/EBIF version of HSN's flagship interactive TV application, Shop by Remote, which allows viewers to use their remote controls to shop and make purchases (note: the roll-out has actually been underway for some time now--see the article published on itvt.com, June 3rd).

In a corporate blog posting, Wednesday, Verizon's director of external communications, Bobbi Henson, announced that the company has partnered with home shopping network, HSN, to create a new widget version of the latter's Shop by Remote interactive TV application for the Verizon FiOS TV platform (note: Comcast has just announced the national roll-out of an EBIF version of Shop by Remote--see the article in this issue). The new widget will feature a "deal of the day" exclusively for FiOS TV customers, Henson said.

HSN, the home shopping network, which has long been a pioneer in adopting new technologies (its Shop-by-Remote interactive TV application, for example, launched on Oceanic Time Warner Cable in early 2006), announced Monday the launch of a free iPhone/iPod touch application, which it bills as enabling it to offer the ecommerce industry's first "live-video 3-screen experience." According to the company, the new application, which is available for download in both the iTunes App Store and on its own HSN.com Web site, offers "all the engaging highlights" provided by the linear-TV and broadband video versions of its service.

[itvt] has learned that Comcast has deployed a tcommerce application for home shopping channel, HSN, as well as a Request for Information (RFI) application, and an app called Ready, Remind, Record (allows viewers to bookmark a show for DVR recording), to over 560,000 customers in the San Francisco Bay Area and around 305,000 customers in Chicago; the MSO has also now deployed Universal Caller ID, its TV- and PC-based

--Radio Interview: ActiveVideo's Jeff Miller Discusses the Deployment