US satellite TV provider, EchoStar (offers service under the brand, DISH Network), has relaunched its DISH Home interactive TV portal. Instead of a text-based menu of interactive services, the portal now presents viewers with seven selectable icons at the bottom of the screen that allow them to access DISH Network's interactive customer-service, news, shopping, sports, games, and entertainment applications respectively, or to exit the portal. More significantly, the portal now offers a multiscreen application that currently allows viewers to switch between feeds from six news, weather and entertainment channels-- CNN, MSNBC, The Weather Channel, E! Entertainment, Bloomberg and Court TV--displayed against a full-motion video background. Viewers can use the arrow keys on their remotes to highlight each of the channels: when a channel is highlighted its audio feed can be heard. When viewers select one of the channels, it automatically goes into full-screen mode. In addition, the portal now offers a clickable banner in the top right hand corner of the screen, which supports full-motion video (though not audio), and which can be linked with an interactive Dedicated Advertiser Location (DAL), similar to those offered by the Sky satellite platform in the UK.
The portal, which also provides an informational ticker, is accessed by tuning to channel 100, by pressing an "interactive TV" button on the DISH Network remote, by launching it from the EPG, or by selecting a triggered advertisement on another channel. The revamp of the portal builds on one-off six-screen mosaics that EchoStar offered during the 2004 Summer Olympics and the 2004 presidential election. Like those mosaics, the revamped DISH Home portal was developed by OpenTV, whose middleware forms the basis of DISH Network's interactive TV services. The latter built the portal to be reconfigurable, which means that EchoStar can refresh the six mosaic mini-screens, the text ticker, the portal's banner ad, its video background and its interactive menu listings with new content at any time. According to DISH Network's director of interactive TV, Scott Higgins, the company plans to take full advantage of the new portal's reconfigurability: "If there's some special event that makes it worthwhile for us to do so, we will pre-empt the news feeds, and offer alternative coverage of that event from each of the feeds--just as we did with the Olympics or the election," he told [itvt]. "We also plan to take advantage of the ticker to sometimes offer news, communicate to our customers, or whatever else might benefit the customer. We can also use the banner sometimes to run promotions for DISH Network services--for example, inviting people to sign up for a new DISH DVR--or to run advertisements from third parties."
