digiANALYSIS, BIZ + BITZ
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IDC To Attend IPTV World Forum—International Datacasting Corporation [TSX:IDC] will be exhibiting its products at the IPTV World Forum in London, England, March 12 to 14. In addition to exhibiting at the event, Ron Clifton, President and CEO, will be a featured speaker during the event. International Datacasting Corporation develops and manufactures a full line of products that can be readily configured to provide end-to-end system solutions for the point-to-multipoint delivery of broadband IPTV content via satellite. The SuperFlex product line includes uplink transmission equipment such as IP encapsulators, encryption subsystems, network management and RF modulators. The product line also includes a full line of advanced integrated receivers/decoders that can easily be installed and are compatible with broadband IP delivery networks. The IPTV World Forum is considered to be one of the worlds leading event focused solely on IPTV and issues surrounding deployment and the growth of the IPTV market. The World Forum consists of a series of regional events across the globe and culminating each March in London at the World Forum. The IPTV World Forum brings together over 400 speakers from leading cable, telecom, satellite, mobile operators and leading content owners—Ottawa, Ontario
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Moving On Up… At Muze…—Muze Inc. has hired Richard Pasewark as the company’s new Vice President of Sales. Richard brings 18 years of sales leadership and market development experience to his role at Muze. He will focus on Muze’s strategic initiatives relating to market growth and serving the company’s client base. Pasewark’s diverse background spans the creative software and enterprise solutions space including leading the launch of new web services and multi-channel publishing products to the graphic arts, publishing, and enterprise software markets. Pasewark is the former Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Quark, Inc., where he led the successful introduction of new channel programs and partnerships. Pasewark has held roles at Adobe, Frame Technology, and EDS—New York, NY
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TiVo Rallies In New England—TiVo, in their Q4 report, indicated their service is fully operational in the New England states via systems that are run by Comcast, meaning there’s about two million subscribers ready to record-pause-record. This was all reported in the company’s Q4 report which also revealed they are moving well with technology trials with the Cox service in New England, as well. However, the not-so-peachy news is a 155,000 net subscriber decline in subs from outside service providers, which was blamed mostly on new TiVo boxes not being deployed by DIRECTV. As of Q4, TiVo indicates they have a total of 3.946 million subs.
digiCONTENT, CREATION + DELIVERY
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What Will Doctor Who Be—Heading for the PC, Playstation 2 and Nintendo DS will be a Doctor Who videogame, developed by Eidos out of the U.K. Given that two of the destination platforms are targeted toward younger gamers, this probably won’t be a title that’s possessed of cutting edge graphics due to the target’s graphic engines—this release is expected to be soon. Previous Doctor Who titles have not faired well and Eidos has had their share of flops—and the company has also produced some blockblusters. Let’s hope this is of the latter variety.
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Middleware Is Free Of Charge—Electra Entertainment has launched its new middleware, which enables the delivery of interactive services such as games, betting and advertising by DTT and satellite broadcasters. Electra licences its technology free of charge to major manufacturers who dynamically embed it in set top box (STBs), Personal Video Recorder (PVRs) and Improved Definition Television (iDTVs). The IP version “iTrove” enables operators to deliver content simultaneously over DVB and IP, enabling real-time interaction for live betting, social networking, messaging and audience response. Electra is owned by General Entertainment Technology Corporation, a newly-established holding company that also controls an 81 percent stake in Static 2358 incorporating interactive games portal PlayJam. OpenTV retains a 19 percent share in Static and PlayJam following its recent sale and holds worldwide rights to market Electra’s technology to its global customer base.
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Harmonic’s Harmonious Solutions—Multimedia Polska, a leading cable and IPTV service provider in Poland with more than 600,000 subscribers, has deployed Harmonic’s on-demand solutions that include Poland’s first live cable VOD service. Originally launched in September 2007, the service was available in six cities, but by the end of this year will be available to the systems’ entire digital cable subscriber base. Multimedia Polska‘s distributed VOD network includes nearly 20 regional sites across the country linked using IP-based connectivity—Sunnyvale, California
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eBooks Push Education Home—Impelsys, Inc. and Abrams & Company have launched Action Math and Action Science eBooks using the Impelsys VirtualPages Talking eBooks engine. The Action Math and Action Science eBooks provide early educational material for children in the pre-kindergarten to 5th grade levels. VirtualPages is an online book presentation system that offers a cost-effective solution for publishers to leverage existing content and create new products to maximize revenues. By adopting the Impelsys solution, Abrams significantly reduced costs and turnaround time to create an almost instantaneous online presence. Apart from developing the digital version, Impelsys added audio read along to enhance the user’s experience. Assessments included in the Talking eBooks allow students to be tested on their progress—New York, New York
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Utah Scientific Delivers For Summer Games—Utah Scientific today has completed the delivery of a large package of routing switchers for use at the upcoming summer games in Beijing. The package consists of four, large, UTAH-400 HD routers for use in the main broadcast center and 34 smaller UTAH-100 HD routers for use in the various event venues. In addition to providing the new systems, Utah Scientific will re-fit the host broadcaster’s existing UTAH-400 routers for expanded HD capacity and will upgrade its system controllers to provide the full feature set of the company’s flagship SC-4 router control system—Salt Lake City, Utah
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Delivery Of Protected Services—Widevine Technologies has announced an integration with Origin Digital. Through this partnership, Widevine and Origin Digital deliver the necessary encoding, content protection and content management to securely distribute ad-supported and other monetized media services from any source to any destination. Content owners and content service providers using the Odaptor platform can now rapidly deploy and provide both subscription-based media and ad-supported content directly to consumers and online video users regardless of their browser, operating system or computing platform. Widevine’s Cypher for Internet Digital Media security solution seamlessly integrates into the Odaptor platform for secure delivery of all video formats, including Adobe Flash, to both PCs and Macs. Upon consumption, Widevine’s PC client invokes an additional level of post-decryption digital copy protection to thwart the hundreds of screen scraping and recording utilities that have become a considerable piracy threat worldwide. Able to record streams and remove valuable online ad inventory, the programs make it easy to distribute premium content across the Internet. The Widevine client monitors, detects and blocks the piracy for complete protection of the business model associated with the delivery of Origin Digital encoded digital media. Origin Digital’s Odaptor is a flexible, Web-based platform that combines powerful media management and transformation capabilities into a single product—Seattle, Washington
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