UK-headquartered Recreate Solutions, which provides outsourcing services to a number of well-known interactive TV companies (including YooMedia and Visiware), has set up an Offshore Testing Farm for Sky/OpenTV applications. The testing farm, which is located in Mumbai (Bombay), India, will cover 44 set-top models and will provide a broadcast environment based on Softel's MediaSphere ITV carousel products. It will be used to provide offshore test facilities for applications to be launched on Sky by Recreate's clients, and is thus set up to take into account the requirements of Sky Subscriber Services Limited (SSSL), the Sky unit which must approve all applications on the Sky platform. According to Recreate, testing typically accounts for around 25% of the overall effort involved in developing ITV applications, and, as a result, the new set-top box farm will significantly reduce the cost of application development. In addition, the company claims that the new farm will speed up the testing process, as it can draw on a pool of in OpenTV and C developers (most of whom have been trained in-house) to run multiple shifts, if required. Recreate says that it plans to extend the test farm to cover other platforms in addition to OpenTV/Sky, and that it is in talks with several leading US operators about replicating their test set-ups in India. "This is in line with our providing quality offshore services, enabling lowering the cost of launch of interactive solutions," Recreate CEO, Bhaskar Majumdar, said in a statement emailed to [itvt]. "Testing is an integral part of the launch process and now, besides providing developmental services, we are looking at setting up testing facilities for the leading international networks."
