US cable-industry research, development and standardization body, CableLabs, said Wednesday that a record 22 companies participated in its latest tru2way/EBIF interoperability event, which was held at its Louisville, Colorado facilities, May 4th through 9th. According to the organization, the week-long event featured laboratory sessions in which over 35 tru2way and ETV/EBIF applications ran across multiple headends, user agents and set-top boxes. The applications ranged from test and diagnostic apps to consumer-oriented interactive TV apps, such as tcommerce apps and apps that enable cable subscribers to customize their viewing experience, CableLabs says. The participating companies were ADB Global, Alcatel-Lucent, BIAP, Cisco Systems, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Ensequence, Flashlight Engineering, Funai, HSN, iCueTV, itaas, Intel, Strategy & Technology, Softel, Sony Electronics, Starz Entertainment, Time Warner Cable, TVWorks, UniSoft, Universal Electronics, Vidiom Systems, and VividLogic.
CableLabs says that it is seeing more vendor participation in its interop events due to the growing market momentum of tru2way this year. It claims that having more participants at a single interop increases the opportunities for collaboration: for example, at the most recent interop, CableLabs says, an OCAP application developer had the opportunity to run its application on as many as six different tru2way host devices, and an ETV application was integrated on four user agents, all in a single location.
CableLabs' next tru2way interop event is scheduled for the fall. There is no charge to participate, the organization says, and an RFI for the event will be posted on its OpenCable project Web site in the OpenCable News and Events section. More information about CableLabs interop events and access to application development tools can be found on the OpenCable Project hosted on Java.net (opencable.dev.java.net). The organization bills the events as providing vendors with an "informal, laboratory setting in which they gain the opportunity to test their latest products within CableLabs' headends and testing environment, determine compliance with CableLabs' specifications and the ability of their products to interoperate with other devices in an end-to-end system."
