OpenTV News:

--NBC Universal in Deal to Use Company's OpenTV Participate Platform

--Brazilian Cable Operator Taps Company to Power HD PVR Service

--Company's EclipsePlus Campaign Management Solution Now Available

--STMicroelectronics Joins Company's Rapid Porting Program

Interactive TV software provider, OpenTV (note: voting control of the
company was acquired last year by content-protection specialist, the
Kudelski Group), has generated a fair amount of news over the past few
weeks:

• Perhaps most significantly, the company has signed a deal with NBC
  Universal that will see the latter using its OpenTV Participate platform
  to power, centralize and manage cross-platform interactive TV
  applications--including Web, mobile and set-top apps--for its various
  broadcast and cable/satellite networks (note: NBC Universal has not yet
  revealed which programs will feature OpenTV Participate-powered
  interactive services). The new, enterprise-wide deal comes
  approximately a year after NBC used OpenTV Participate to power
  live, two-screen, Web-based interactive services for its primetime
  series, "Heroes.” The services were created, scheduled, managed and
  analyzed using Participate's production tools, and then synchronized
  with the "Heroes" broadcast each Monday night across all four
  continental US time zones: audiences could interact with the show's
  broadcasts in real time by taking part in live polls and offering their
  own predictions on the outcome of its storylines. "We are very pleased
  to have been chosen by one of the biggest media and entertainment
  companies in the world to be the central component of its multiplatform
  interactivity," OpenTV CEO, Ben Bennett, said in a prepared
  statement. "We look forward to a long-term relationship with NBC
  Universal, a company that we consider to be at the forefront of
  innovation in viewer-participation television." Added Jon Dakss, NBC
  Universal's VP of interactive media product development: "OpenTV
  Participate allows us to differentiate our programming and make it
  more engaging and fun for our viewers across all devices. It's an
  intuitive, easy-to-deploy solution that offers our viewers unique ways
  of getting more involved with their favorite shows, and enables new
  interactive marketing opportunities for advertisers as well." OpenTV
  bills Participate as a server-based system that can process several
  thousand transactions per second in real time, in order to deliver a
  personalized interactive experience to viewers on any platform
  (including cable, satellite, terrestrial, mobile or the Web). In addition to
  broadcast-synchronized ITV services, the company says, Participate
  also allows for "virtually unlimited" value-added content, such as trivia,
  sponsor messages and interactive advertising.

  

• The company says that Brazil's Net Servicos de Comunicacao, which
  claims to be Latin America's largest cable operator, has selected its
  Core2 and PVR2 middleware platforms to support its launch of HD
  PVR service. Net Servicos, which is an existing customer of OpenTV,
  is the first operator in Latin America to deploy the company's
  combined middleware and PVR solution. The Core2 middleware and
  its PVR2 extension are designed to support both HD and SD display.
  According to OpenTV, Net Servicos has started deploying its HD PVR
  service, and plans to make it available throughout Brazil. "With
  OpenTV's solutions, we are able to provide advanced services to our
  viewers, which allows us to offer meaningful and compelling digital
  experiences to our subscribers and grow our customer base," Net
  Servicos CEO, Jose Antonio Guaraldi Felix, said in a prepared
  statement. "Our new service, Net HD Max, allows customers to
  reproduce and record HDTV content in a personalized and interactive
  experience. We look forward to continuing the convergence revolution
  that Net is leading in Brazil by expanding our advanced services
  offering across the country."
• The company has announced the general availability of its advertising
  campaign management solution, OpenTV EclipsePlus. The company
  bills the solution--which can be deployed on cable, satellite or IPTV
  platforms--as a complete, end-to-end ad campaign management
  solution that supports the increasing demands of local TV ad sales
  organizations, allowing them to maximize inventory, reduce manual
  tasks and increase their operational efficiencies. According to OpenTV,
  the solution is designed to accommodate the increasing complexity and
  traffic volume of ad sales operations by being able to handle thousands
  of local and interconnect networks, schedule complex channel
  environments, and run multiple DMA's within a single database. It
  incorporates a dynamic scheduler (an automated scheduling system that
  is billed as improving inventory yield and reducing labor-intensive
  activities in large systems) and an advanced Web services interface
  (provides support for electronic, real-time data exchange between
  EclipsePlus and the sales proposal system, and, according to OpenTV,
  "virtually eliminates" the need for paper-based revisions and
  significantly reduces the time spent clearing orders). "We are very
  pleased to announce the general availability of OpenTV EclipsePlus as
  planned and on schedule, bringing the benefits of improved scale and
  performance to the market in time to support Olympic and political
  advertising seasons," Paul Woidke, OpenTV's recently hired SVP and
  general manager of advanced advertising, said in a prepared statement.
• The company says that set-top box chip manufacturer,
  STMicroelectronics, has joined its Rapid Porting Program, an initiative
  which it bills as enabling rapid, high-quality ports of OpenTV
  middleware to a wide range of chipsets and set-top boxes. As part of its
  participation in the program, ST will be able to create OpenTV Core2-
  certified drivers for its STi520x and STi710x chipsets, which OpenTV
  says will enable manufacturers to expedite their development and
  porting efforts and bring set-tops to market faster. The drivers will
  initially be targeted at the MPEG-4 Zapper (Sagem) set-top box market.
  "OpenTV's program allows us to provide a highly cost-effective
  solution to our customers, perfectly complementing the high-end
  solutions from our partners and allowing ST to have the most widely
  deployed and most complete OpenTV platforms," Philippe Lambinet,
  EVP and general manager of ST's Home Entertainment Group, said in a
  prepared statement. "We are pleased to join OpenTV's program and be
  a part of this unique initiative aimed at providing significant benefits to
  operators worldwide."