T-Home Taps emuse to Build ITV Application for Bundesliga Soccer

Dublin, Ireland-based interactive TV authoring solutions provider,
emuse, has been tapped by T-Home, the Microsoft
Mediaroom-powered IPTV service of German incumbent telco,
Deutsche Telekom, to develop an ITV application to complement
T-Home's coverage of German soccer's Bundesliga (note: Deutsche
Telekom, which signed a development agreement with emuse late last
year, holds the IPTV rights for Bundesliga soccer for T-Home).
According to the companies, the "Bundesliga Interaktive" application
features coverage of up to nine concurrent live soccer matches every
game weekend; lets viewers watch a variety of those games
simultaneously; and also lets viewers access catch-up footage of select
game highlights as little as 30 seconds after the highlighted events
occur. The app also lets viewers access club updates, player news and
match statistics. In addition, the full games and game highlight
packages are archived for later viewing on-demand.

The Bundesliga Interaktive application, which is offered to T-Home
subscribers free of charge, is accessed via the blue button (which is
actually dedicated to the application), by navigating through the
T-Home interactive services menu, or by entering a dedicated channel
number. According to emuse and Deutsche Telekom, the app will allow
T-Home's customers to access video clips for every significant event in
every Bundesliga soccer match, both live and retrospectively, for the
entire season. In addition, the company says, it will allow T-Home
customers to construct play lists for the entire league and for individual
teams. "emuse has an unparalleled track record in live IPTV
deployments, having worked with companies including British
Telecom and T-Home," emuse CEO, Patrick Rainsford, said in a
prepared statement. "It is especially rewarding, however, to have
deployed the Bundesliga Interaktive service, which we believe is the
most sophisticated event-driven and video-rich application yet
deployed on the Microsoft Mediaroom platform anywhere in the
world." emuse and T-Home launched a beta-release of Bundesliga
Interaktive at the end of the 2007-2008 soccer season. The new version
of the app offers a number of additional features, including a live
summary of all games currently being played, a league table, a
top-scorers list, and an "at-a-glance" view of all games being played on
the current day. The companies say that they expect to announce
"further developments" in their partnership over the coming months.
(Note: at the IBC show in Amsterdam earlier this month, Microsoft TV
showcased an emuse-built Mediaroom application that presented BBC
content--see article in this issue.)