cnn

Because the [itvt] editorial team is on the road this week, we are covering stories in this edition of the newsletter in round-up format:

Interactive video technology provider Coincident TV named cable TV and Internet veteran John Gilles executive vice president of sales and marketing and general manager of Coincident Studios. 

Because the [itvt] editorial team has been busy this week working on the TV of Tomorrow Show 2011, we are covering recent news in round-up/summary form. Once again, we anticipate that it will take us a few days to catch up with all the news we plan to cover: so if your company has sent us a press release or briefed us on an announcement, and you don't see your news covered in this issue, please bear with us.

Comcast and Time Warner said Tuesday that they have expanded their "TV Everywhere" partnership with a long-term agreement that will provide Comcast digital cable customers with online and mobile access to "hundreds of hours" of content from networks operated by Time Warner-subsidiary, Turner Broadcasting System, including TNT, TBS, CNN, HLN, truTV, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim (note: the "TV Everywhere" programming distribution model, which was originally championed by Time Warner chairman and CEO, Jeff Bewkes, seeks, via authentication technology, to make programming that pay-TV customers have already paid for through their cable, satellite or IPTV subscriptions available to those customers on

In a posting on its corporate blog, Tuesday, Verizon FiOS TV announced that it has expanded its "TV Everywhere" offering by making CNN's main US channel and Headline News (HLN) companion channel available live online to authenticated subscribers.

TAG Networks--an interactive TV games company that has developed a games-on-demand channel, called TAG, which it says integrates with existing VOD infrastructures (note: the company has a history of working closely with ActiveVideo Networks and is involved in the latter's deployments with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision)--contacted [itvt] Tuesday to let us know that new TNS data, measuring daily time spent viewing per set-top box, show that the TAG channel topped 43 linear channels available through Time Warner Cable's Hawaiian arm, Oceanic Time Warner Cable, for the most minutes viewers spent watching.

Verismo Networks, a Silicon Valley-based company that offers an over-the-top-TV platform called VuNow (note: the platform has traditionally been offered in conjunction with a small set-top box device called the PoD; however, back in February, Verismo announced the launch of a global OEM initiative targeting consumer OEM's, content aggregators and ISP's--see the article published on itvt.com, May 8th), announced Tuesday that the VuNow platform can now play content from, among other sources, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, CNN, ESPN and Amazon

CNN's user-generated news service, iReport, has launched a
user-generated short film competition. Entitled the iReport Film
Festival, the competition invites voters to document this year's US
presidential campaign from their personal vantage point, whether they
are volunteering for one of the campaigns or simply have compelling
stories about the election that they want to document creatively. "CNN
was the first network to launch user-generated news coverage, with
iReport, and then pioneered its integration into political coverage
beginning with last year's groundbreaking CNN/YouTube presidential
debates," Jon Klein, president of CNN US, said in a prepared

US cable-industry research, development and standards organization,
CableLabs, recently issued a press release trumpeting the "broad
exposure" enjoyed by tru2way- and ETV/EBIF-based interactive TV
applications at this year's NCTA Cable Show. Among the Cable Show
tru2way and ETV demos highlighted by CableLabs in the release: