Is Partnering with Ensequence
Interactive TV software company, Zodiac Interactive, says it has developed ETV/EBIF players for the Scientific-Atlanta (Cisco) PowerTV platform and tru2way. According to the company, it has been working with Ensequence to ensure that the latter's Create authoring software fully supports the EBIF player for PowerTV and that the player is fully compliant with the CableLabs ETV/EBIF IO4 standard. It says that the EBIF player for PowerTV is "widely available" today and has been successfully tested with multiple interactive TV experiences that were developed for the EBIF standard. It says that its EBIF player for tru2way should be available in the first quarter of 2009. "As one of the leading application developers for tru2way, Zodiac has supported CableLabs initiatives for many years, and we are now pleased to also support EBIF through a generally available EBIF player," Zodiac CEO, Michael Rivkin, said in a prepared statement. "The EBIF player we're announcing today is the lightest, least memory-intensive, and highest-performing player on the market, and it's 100% compliant to the EBIF specification."
In its press release announcing the new players, Zodiac stated that EBIF is fully deployable on all set-top boxes in subscribers' homes today; and that Comcast and Time Warner Cable recently announced that they would support interactive TV standards on more than 10 million set-tops by the end of 2009--which, Zodiac says, is encouraging a "flurry" of development for the EBIF standard (note: Zodiac's figure of 10 million may actually be quite conservative: at the recent CTAM Summit in Boston, Comcast's SVP of video product development, Mark Hess, said that the MSO expects to have enabled EBIF in 10 million homes by the end of this year and to have enabled it on all its Motorola-based systems by the middle of next year; and, according to a report by Cable Digital News's Jeff Baumgartner, Time Warner Cable's SVP of video product strategy, Bob Benya, expects his company to have EBIF running on all its digital set-top boxes sometime next year). Among other things, the standard will be the basis of Canoe Ventures, an initiative between six major US cable operators to develop a unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising. "We're excited to see broad adoption of the EBIF standard across the industry, and we are proud to support Zodiac's new EBIF player," Ensequence CEO, Dalen Harrison, said in a prepared statement. "This is another example of how Ensequence is bringing the most dynamic and engaging viewing experiences to the broadest audience across the widest range of set-top boxes. Ensequence software and services enable distributors to build a scalable interactive TV business, which dramatically increases viewer engagement and advertising revenues."
