Red Bee Media News

--Teams with Netgem and Microsoft on Hybrid DTT/IPTV Service
--Teams with Autonomy on White-Label Navigation Tool
--Plans to Develop White-Label Navigation Platform for Media Center PC's

UK-based Red Bee Media (note: the company, which was formerly a BBC business unit called BBC Broadcast, was recently sold to Creative Broadcast Services, a company 65% owned by Macquarie Capital Alliance Group and 35% owned by Macquarie Bank) has announced a number of new products and services in recent weeks:

• It is teaming with French set-top box company, Netgem, and with Microsoft on a hybrid digital terrestrial/IPTV service. The service, which is scheduled to launch in the UK in the late summer and which the companies say will be available through ISP's and retail outlets, will be based on Netgem's HD set-top technologies, Microsoft's Windows Media technologies, and on the technologies that form the basis of Red Bee Media's recently launched Digital Hive initiative (note: the latter is designed to enable content owners, rights holders and distributors to get their content on new platforms, including mobile, VOD, broadband and video iPods--for more on the initiative, see [itvt] Issue 6.65 Part 2). It will allow end-users to access digital terrestrial television, such as the UK's free-to-air Freeview offering, and IP-delivered on-demand programming via a hybrid DTT/IPTV set-top box. The service's VOD offerings will be encoded in Windows Media Video Format (VC-1) and protected by Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10. Among other things, the partners say, the service will provide access to all Freeview channels, a navigation interface for downloaded video and audio content, an EPG, an interactive program guide, pause-live-TV, playback in HD, broadband connectivity, and home networking/media sharing (using Windows Media Connect). "The end-to-end solution we are building with Microsoft and Red Bee Media will enable any UK Internet Service Provider to offer an innovative, integrated live TV and video-on-demand service to its customer base without extensive infrastructure investment, thanks to our hybrid digital set-top box design and network software," Netgem CEO, Joseph Haddad, said in a prepared statement.
• It has teamed with Autonomy on a white-label navigation tool, dubbed Sherpa, which is targeted at platform owners, and which allows consumers to navigate through, discover and retrieve multimedia content. According to Red Bee, Sherpa combines Autonomy's unstructured information search capabilities with Red Bee's own repository of content-linked metadata to provide a powerful search and navigation tool, user interface and interactive program guide that can be customized for specific brands and content owners. It allows users to explore multiple TV-Anytime categories, including channel, genre, title, studio, director, actor or plot. Users can access and share visual, audio and text-based content, Red Bee says, and build their own libraries and playlists, in order to deliver more relevant retrievals. When using Sherpa, users can scroll through channels, genres and other categories, rolling trails of content, drilling up and down, and selecting content to view, listen to, read or play. According to Red Bee, the tool's interface can be customized both by clients and end-users to permit more visual, audio, textual, graphical or animated options, or to favor certain types of category. It retrieves content by different streaming and download technologies, as favored by the end-user company and platform. Users can also book ahead, or book a series, or search remotely via SMS from their mobile handset to book onto their PC or set-top box. At the NAB show in Las Vegas earlier this week, Red Bee revealed that it has signed a deal with chipmaker, AMD, under which the Sherpa tool will be available on select AMD-powered PC's and small-form-factor devices. The deal also calls for the companies to collaborate on the development of applications to support new advertising models: the companies say that the applications will build on the Sherpa tool to enable delivery of relevant advertising to individual consumers.
• It has announced plans to develop a white-label platform that will allow consumers to navigate content services designed specifically for Windows XP Media Center Edition PC's. The platform will be based on the new Sherpa navigation tool. "We're pleased that Red Bee Media is optimizing its Sherpa technology for Windows XP Media Center Edition, providing consumers with more convenient experiences for accessing their favorite media," Andrew Adamyk, group program manager for Media Center Services at Microsoft, said in a prepared statement. "The Media Center ecosystem continues to grow rapidly. As more and more content providers deliver their content to Media Center users, it becomes increasingly important for third-parties to provide consumers with ways to search quickly and easily through large libraries of on-demand content."

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