News Round-Up (V): Limelight, Delve Networks, Motorola, Verizon FiOS TV, Notion

Because the [itvt] editorial team has been on the road the past few weeks, we are covering recent news stories in summary/round-up form. We anticipate that it will take a few days for us to catch up with all the recent news: so if your company has sent us a press release or briefed us on an announcement, and you don't yet see your news covered in this issue, please bear with us. We apologize for any inconvenience to our readers.

• Limelight Networks has announced that it has acquired Delve Networks, a provider of cloud-based video publishing and analytics services. "As online content consumption accelerates, content producers and online businesses need scalable tools to easily and quickly publish their video and syndicate it to an ever-expanding list of Web properties and connected devices," Limelight chairman and CEO, Jeff Lunsford, said in a prepared statement. "With Delve Networks added to our global computing infrastructure, Limelight Networks now can provide our customers with an at-scale value-added solution for publishing online video, analyzing end-user preferences, and, in conjunction with our EyeWonder and mobility products, monetizing their digital assets." Delve offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform which it bills as providing online businesses with a "streamlined and scalable solution for the addition, management, syndication, analysis, and monetization of Web video," and as "offer[ing] all the tools necessary for publishing videos online, including hosting, encoding, channel and playlist management, video search, metrics, and advertising."
• Motorola is developing a tablet device that will allow users to watch TV on it and that will be targeted at subscribers to Verizon's FiOS TV service, according to a report in the Financial Times last week. The device will be based on Google's Android platform, will have a 10-inch screen, could launch as soon as this fall, and--unlike the Apple iPad--will support Adobe Flash, the report stated. The Financial Times also reported that the device will be thinner and lighter than the iPad, will share data wirelessly with nearby devices, and will incorporate a user-facing camera for video conferencing, as well as a separate camera for taking photographs.
• Dublin-based design company, Notion, has developed a concept, two-screen interactive TV platform, called Meta-Mirror, that displays a TV broadcast's interactive elements, together with a "mirror" of the TV broadcast itself, on a second screen such as an Apple iPad, in order to 1) ensure that those interactive elements don't disrupt the traditional TV viewing experience by cluttering the TV screen, and 2) allow personalized interactivity in scenarios where multiple viewers are watching the same TV. "Meta-Mirror is a concept application that delivers an enhanced television experience without disrupting the conventional expectations of home entertainment," Notion explains in its press materials. "It allows viewers to access content relevant to the program currently being viewed. The product is a software platform which runs on a secondary device of the user's choice, displaying this contextual content over a mirror of the television broadcast. By bringing together live television, real-time contextual information and an intuitive user interface, Meta-Mirror is positioned to update television from uni-directional broadcast to two-way interaction. Three scenarios explain how this can happen: For sports, the main screen is dedicated to the game/match in question. Real-time statistics of the game, together with twitter updates and other scores of the viewer's choice, are all overlaid on the device running Meta-Mirror. In addition, new forms of online betting/merchandising/purchasing are enabled. In lifestyle programming, tagged objects, in this case ingredients, become clickable. This, in combination with third-party supermarket plug-ins, makes putting together shopping baskets simple. Music broadcasts are enriched by track names, album details and further artist information. Direct links to iTunes, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia and broadcasters' music Web sites allow viewers to delve further into the music on screen. As smart object recognition becomes more commonplace, instruments are tagged automatically." (H/t Leslie Katz, CNET)