Savannah, Georgia-based Ligos said Wednesday that it has closed a deal with "one of the nation's largest cable operators"--which it did not identify--for a set of its EBIF-based ETV Mosaic systems, and that the operator will deploy the technology later this year (note: for more on Ligos's EBIF version of its flagship Mosaic EPG technology, see the article published on itvt.com, July 7th). According to the company, ETV Mosaic enables the creation and delivery of interactive presentations "for program guides and much more" on EBIF-enabled systems. It says that the new cable "win" represents a "significant affirmation" of its ETV initiatives, which it says are set to expand throughout 2010 as EBIF and other industry-standard interactive TV platforms expand their reach across millions of set-top boxes.
According to Ligos, its ETV Mosaic technology produces an enhanced visual program guide with multiple navigable thumbnails of live video channels. Viewers can use their remote control to navigate through and highlight individual tiles, in order to hear the accompanying audio and tune to the channel associated with the thumbnail. The company claims that the system integrates all necessary functions--stream input, compositing, metadata, encoding, EBIF, ETV carousel and stream output--into a single, compact server platform.
Ligos has actually offered its Mosaic technology since 2006, and says that it has been used by a number of multichannel operators worldwide to create visually rich interactive TV portals featuring news and sports programming, movies, VOD and special event programming such as Olympics coverage (in November, 2008, for example, the company announced a deployment with Cablevision Mexico--see the article published on itvt.com, January 31st, 2009). Among other things, the company touts the system's ability to support dynamic content scheduling and advertising.
However, Ligos claims that ETV Mosaic is more flexible and powerful than its previous product offerings, and is "free of the limited support provided by guide middleware." With ETV Mosaic, the company says, operators can implement custom layouts that are enhanced with interactivity that goes beyond visual guide channels. According to the company, with features such as scrolling text crawls and the ability to utilize external data resources through its API, ETV is an advanced presentation engine for the delivery of fully featured interactive TV applications. It says that the system automatically generates the corresponding audiovisual and navigational EBIF dataset that is compatible with leading EBIF user agents, as well as industry-standard interfaces for addressable advertising and messaging. In addition, the company claims, ETV Mosaic features a unique integrated ETV carousel that allows the system to function in a standalone capacity, thus reducing overall cost and complexity for multichannel operators.
Meanwhile, for content providers, Ligos says, ETV Mosaic features integrated EBIF authoring capabilities, allowing the development and delivery of sophisticated interactive TV content to viewers and potential customer subscribers. According to the company, the system's graphical environment allows designers to create content in a fashion similar to--and as easily as--composing presentation slides. Thanks to the system's multiple module support and ability to combine pre-rendered graphic elements with less complex EBIF elements, the company says, content is optimized to load quickly and function smoothly across both new and legacy set-top boxes. Ligos also claims that ETV Mosaic supports the standard specifications for ETV content definition and delivery, meaning that content can be created and packaged in-house and delivered to any carousel system at the headend.
