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Plano Texas-based BIAP Systems (note: the company, whose name is an acronym for "Broadband Interactive Applications," was founded in 1998 by a group of former NASA scientists who had met while working on the Space Station; it recently completed a $20 million funding round–see [itvt] Issue 6.87 Part 1) has been issued a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for its apparatus and method for retrieving and displaying Internet content. While the patent also covers use of the technology on PC’s, mobile phones, and PDA’s, BIAP’s primary use of the technology to date has been in the interactive television sphere: the company has used the technology to enable applications on a number of cable systems around the US. Those applications include "PiTV" (short for "Personalized Information Television"), which provides subscribers with personalizable local news, sports, traffic and weather information, local movie listings, financial news, lottery results, and information on local school districts; "eBay on TV," an interactive TV version of the eponymous online auction service; and fantasy football and baseball trackers (note: features of the latter two apps include a 3/4-screen overlay that provides constantly updated game scores, leaderboards, roster updates and player news; a single-ticker view that provides personalized player stats and scoring alerts; a full-screen scoreboard that shows scheduled, ongoing and completed games for the current day; full-screen leaderboards; a full-screen view, displaying daily, weekly and year-to-year player statistics; an on-screen indicator that lights up in red whenever one of the players on a viewer’s roster achieves a milestone; and a settings menu that allows viewers to personalize the app’s start-up screen and to specify the kinds of scoring alerts they want to see). The company also used its newly patented technology to develop a free interactive TV service, dubbed "NBC Olympics NOW," that accompanied NBC’s coverage of the recent Winter Olympics on Time Warner Cable.

According to BIAP, its patented technology uses "artificial intelligence agents" to retrieve and display data on televisions: these "agents" are downloaded to the set-top box, where they retrieve content from various Internet locations at pre-arranged intervals (those intervals can be as short as a minute). The retrieval of content can also be accomplished on-command by the viewer. The content-retrieval agents run on "all levels" of set-top boxes, the company says, and do not require the viewer to use any special equipment: they are downloaded to the set-top from software that has been loaded into the cable headend. "BIAP is powering the interactive television revolution with today’s most innovative products," BIAP CEO, Tim Peters, said in a prepared statement. "The award of BIAP’s content agent patent secures BIAP’s place as the pre-eminent provider of specialized on-screen features that will engage television viewers in ways previously never dreamed of." (Note: earlier this month, BIAP announced additional deployments of its technology–see article in this issue.)

Originally Published: September 27, 2006 in [itvt] Issue 6.96 Part 2

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