ebif

[itvt] is pleased to announce the schedule of sessions for EBIF Intensive (takes place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Friday, March 5th--i.e. the day after The TV of Tomorrow Show 2010). The schedule is included in full below, and a PDF version can be downloaded here.

[itvt] has just published the latest edition of Rick Howe's regular column, "The iTV Doctor Is In!" This week, Tyler Slocum, senior director of advanced services at DirecTV, discusses the satellite TV operator's app store and its line-up of widgets.

[itvt] has just published a radio interview with Braxton Jarratt, co-founder and CEO of Clearleap, an Atlanta-based company which offers a technology platform for bringing Internet-sourced video content to television sets.

Ligos--a Savannah, Georgia-based interactive TV company that says its goal is to "extend standards-based video processing technology in order to deliver highly personalized video services over open platforms"--contacted [itvt] Wednesday to let us know that it will be demo'ing its ETV Mosaic system at next week's CableLabs Winter Conference in Denver as part of the conference's EBIF Ecosystem area. The company bills ETV Mosaic as a visual EBIF authoring and playout system that provides tools for creating and delivering rich interactive content to subscribers, and that is targeted at multichannel operators, content owners and solutions providers that have adopted the CableLabs EBIF spec (enables interactive TV applications on limited-resource legacy set-top boxes).

During Comcast's conference call with financial analysts following the release of its Q4, 2009 results, Wednesday, CEO, Brian Roberts, and COO, Steve Burke, provided a brief update on the status of its interactive TV deployments and plans.

"We will...continue to invest in our network, extending our technical capabilities even further, more widely deploying EBIF technology, for instance, to support interactive TV and advertising," Roberts stated in his presentation. "And through our newly formed Comcast Labs we will focus on extending and integrating IP technology in order to improve the customer experience, accelerate the pace at which we introduce new products, and expand our cross-platform experiences."

Clearleap, an Atlanta-based company which offers a technology platform for bringing Internet-sourced video content to television sets, and FourthWall Media, the interactive TV technology company formerly known as BIAP (note: for more on the company's rebranding, see the article published on itvt.com, October 26th), will today announce that they have partnered to create a video-centric, unbound EBIF interactive weather application featuring content from The Weather Channel.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

[itvt] is pleased to present "EBIF Intensive," a special one-day workshop/dialog event that will take place in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 5th, the day after The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd and 4th).

Interactive TV software developer, Zodiac Interactive (note: the company recently launched version 2.5 of its PowerUp ITV Framework--see the article published on itvt.com, January 12th), announced Monday that its EBIF user agent is successfully operating in conjunction with applications from multiple vendors and development environments within the cable ITV ecosystem, including NDS for addressable EBIF-based interactive ads to individual Cisco (Scientific-Atlanta) set-top boxes.

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.

Interactive TV software developer, Zodiac Interactive (note: the company's EBIF user agent is being deployed by MSO Cablevision--see the article published on itvt.com, November 5th), on Monday unveiled the latest version (2.5) of its PowerUp ITV framework, a cross-platform software that the company bills as unifying and enabling advanced interactive TV applications across multiple set-tops, including legacy boxes.

Due to the volume of news generated by last week's Consumer Electronics Show, and because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

[itvt] has just published the latest edition of Rick Howe's regular column, "The iTV Doctor Is In!" This week's column features Peter Flood, head of business development for North America at Playcast Media, discussing how that company's technology enables video games--including sophisticated console games--to be played on legacy set-top boxes.

Canoe Ventures, the company tasked with implementing the US cable industry's plans for interactive and addressable advertising (note: its backers are Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House), plans to commercially launch an EBIF-based Request for Information (RFI) interactive TV advertising product in the spring, and began a trial of RFI interactive TV advertising with a network partner in the fourth quarter of 2009, the company's senior director of marketing communications, Dana Runnells, told Multichannel News's Todd Spangler last week.