Icareus in Interactive TV Games Deal with Chinese IPTV Provider, Shanghai Telecom

Helsinki-based interactive TV company, Icareus (note: the company's offerings include a range of authoring and delivery solutions for MHP, OCAP/tru2way, MHEG and other platforms, as well as an extensive catalog of off-the-shelf interactive TV games and other applications), said Wednesday that it has signed a cooperation agreement with Shanghai Telecom, a subsidiary of telecommunications giant, China Telecom.

The agreement, which was signed earlier this month, calls for Icareus's content-production arm, Icareus Studios, to provide Shanghai Telecom with a range of IPTV games. Shanghai Telecom claims to have over 600,000 IPTV subscribers and aims to increase that number to a million by the end of the year. "IPTV games are one of the most important application types for the Shanghai Telecom IPTV service," a Mr. Zhu, who serves as director of Shanghai Telecom's IPTV Center, said in a prepared statement. "Cooperation with Icareus will help us provide good service to our subscribers. New games from Icareus will continue to improve our subscribers' user-experience."

In May (see the article published on itvt.com, May 14th), Icareus acquired Shanghai-based Innosonic Information Technology, a subsidiary of Finnish mobile company, Innosonic. It says it is currently focusing on two main business areas in China: IPTV applications and services, and interactive mobile services. Icareus--whose clients include Siemens, Tandberg, RiksTV, Samsung, NEC Europe, Broadcast Service Danmark, RAI Torino, Ericsson, Teleca Italia, LG, Radio Television Brunei, Telecom Italia, ORF Austria, Philips, Multiplus, Irdeto, Thales and Reti Televisive Digital--says that its IPTV games and applications portfolio currently features 20 titles and that it has already moved part of its development work to China.

In related news: Hong Kong-based IPTV technology provider, Broadband Network Systems (note: the company, which is generally referred to as BNS and whose customers include PCCW and Nokia, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Infinio Group), said Wednesday that it has signed a five-year exclusive contract with Taiwanese in-building broadband service provider, Max Media, to build and deploy IPTV services. The deal calls for BNS to provide Max Media with complete turnkey IPTV solutions, including network equipment, software, content, system integration, maintenance and support services, for residential complexes, commercial buildings and hotels. The solutions will power a service that is slated to offer 45 channels, HDTV, VOD and tcommerce.

Earlier this year (see the article published on itvt.com, June 16th), BNS unveiled a tcommerce solution, dubbed BNS Touch, that it bills as melding IPTV technology with "invisible" dot-code printing and recognition technology in order to combine "the browsing convenience of printed information with the information-rich multimedia experience of the online world." The solution is offered in conjunction with a pen-like device, called The Wiz, which incorporates a small infrared camera and a sensor that reads codes associated with items in a printed catalog, allowing related information (as well as video and a shopping basket or other payment mechanisms) to be displayed on the TV screen when a consumer uses the device while browsing the catalog. The device thus links "the printed with the online/TV world," BNS claims.