Espial Announces Latest Release of its IPTV Middleware

Canadian digital TV software provider, Espial, last week announced the latest release of its Evo TV Service Platform IPTV middleware. According to the company, the new release offers:

• Three-screen support for new VOD and subscription management services from PC's and mobile phones.
• Personalized UI advertising, allowing operators to build targeted advertising campaigns that include static, clickable and video ads.
• Timeshift-TV services, allowing subscribers to take advantage of network-based start-over TV, catch-up TV and pause-live-TV.
• Arabic language and right-to-left character support.
• Professional-grade developer tools for rapid, easy and standards-based service creation using a PC-based integrated development and preview environment.
• Operational enhancements which are billed as reducing operational costs and which the company says include "seamless" upgrades, new CPE management features, set-top box self-registration, and security enhancements reflecting an independent security audit.

In related news:

• Oregan Networks, a UK-based provider of media browser solutions for retail consumer electronics and carrier IPTV appliances, announced last week that its Onyx browser for connected TV's and set-top boxes is now equipped with an enhanced, uninterrupted video streaming capability. According to the company, the new mechanism allows for unicast video streaming services to be delivered to non-PC consumer electronics in any format, in real time and without the need to buffer or store files on devices. The company says that adaptive streaming logic inside the Onyx browser enables the bitrate of the video--and therefore its quality--to be continuously adjusted in accordance with the actual broadband capacity available to an end-user's device at any given time. Adaptive streaming capability is now an integral part of the media streaming player inside Onyx, Oregan says, ensuring that network glitches have little or no perceived effect on the Internet video viewing experience. "According to Oregan's consumer research, at least 82% of users are concerned that the Web video watching experience would be compromised by excessive buffering time," Milya Timergaleyeva, Oregan's VP of market strategy, said in a prepared statement. "Adaptive streaming offers a solution to the bandwidth sustainability challenges and is rapidly gaining traction in the long-form online video market, as the amount and types of content available to consumers on the public Internet are exponentially rising. Adaptive streaming resolves consumers' frustration with the time it takes to start video playback, as well as sudden interruptions to the stream when the player needs to re-buffer before continuing the show--unacceptable in a commercial over-the-top service environment." Oregan Onyx for networked HDTV's is based on the company's flagship Oregan Media Browser technology, which it says is able to stream both encrypted and clear video in various encoding standards, including H.264, WMV9 and Flash.
• Dreampark, a Swedish provider of middleware for cable, terrestrial and IPTV environments, last week announced its Dreamgallery middleware's support for over-the-top TV services.