Technology

[itvt] is pleased to announce the schedule of sessions for The TV of Tomorrow Show 2010 (March 3rd-4th, San Francisco). The schedule is included in full below.

Our PDF version can be downloaded here.

Tickets are now at FULL PRICE of $1275. Tickets can be purchased here.

[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.

Verizon has launched a Spend Smart interactive TV coupon widget in its FiOS TV Widget Bazaar Applications Marketplace as part of a cross-platform initiative with electronic and mobile couponing specialist, Cellfire, that also sees it offering free Spend Smart coupons on its Wireless and Internet services. According to the company, Cellfire's Spend Smart coupons cover a wide range of products and can be redeemed at over 4,000 locations of more than 20 national grocery chains, including ShopRite, Safeway and Kroger. Coupon brands and products rotate every two weeks, the company says, with more than $25 in monthly grocery discounts available at any given time.

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."

Broadband video platform provider, Ooyala, on Wednesday announced the launch of its Video Search Engine Optimization SDK. Using Ooyala's video publishing tools, the company says, the SDK allows developers to expose video metadata to search engines in order to improve search engine rankings.

Espial, the Canadian digital TV software company that in 2008 bought US IPTV and video-on-demand technology provider, Kasenna (note: the deal valued Kasenna, which had raised $90 million in funding since its launch in 2000, at around $6.5 million), said Wednesday that Chinese cable operator, Jilin Cable Network, has selected its Espial MediaBase VOD platform to power a range of on-demand services. Espial acquired the MediaBase product line through the Kasenna purchase. According to Espial, Jilin, which serves 3 million subscribers in northeast China, is using MediaBase to offer VOD, TV on-demand, network DVR and timeshift-TV services to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, using more than 60 time-shift TV channel captures.

A two-screen enhanced TV service, called TellyLinks, that is the brainchild of former ITV Consumer managing director, Jeff Henry, and former ITV Digital Channels managing director, Rob Ovens, launched a trial in the UK last night in association with a broadcast of an episode of the US drama, "Numb3rs," on terrestrial network, Five.

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.

DirecTV said Tuesday that its DirecTV DVR Scheduler app for iPhone/iPod touch has been downloaded by over a million users since launching last March. In 2009, the app, which is now also available on Android devices and on the Palm Pre and Pixi, was selected as one of forbes.com's Best Branded Mobile Apps, named Best Mobile Application by the Mobile Excellence Awards, and highlighted as one of Apple's Favorite Staff Picks, the satellite TV provider says.

Canadian telco, Telus, has launched a new version of its Telus TV service in Western Canada that is based on the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform. The company says that the service is initially available in and around Edmonton and in 40 or so communities in British Columbia and Alberta, and will be expanded over time. Customers of Telus's earlier implementation of Telus TV, which is powered by Minerva Networks' IPTV platform, will have the opportunity to upgrade over the coming months, the company says. "We're excited that Telus has chosen Microsoft Mediaroom as the platform for their next-generation Telus TV service," Andreas Mueller-Schubert, general manager of Microsoft's TV and Video Platforms Business, said in a prepared statement.

Widget Realm, a company that offers content publishing services for desktop apps, mobile devices and connected TV sets, on Tuesday launched its "Broadcast-It-Yourself" service for Internet-connected devices running the Yahoo! Widget Engine. According to the company, the new service will enable any developer to easily create and distribute TV widgets to millions of connected TV's and other connected devices. "Yahoo! and Widget Realm are going to enable an explosion of interactive television content," Widget Realm CEO, Brian Powell, said in a prepared statement. "We're excited to be working with the Yahoo!

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 will be covering most stories in summary/round-up form over the next few weeks. Here is a round-up of recent news in various categories:

Live Internet broadcasting service provider, Ustream, announced late Monday that it has secured $75 million in a Series B funding round that was led by Softbank of Japan, and that additional funding commitments are pending from other investors in the US and Asia. The company says that the funding will help it continue its growth in the US, and allow it to expand its presence in the Asia Pacific region where it is hoping to pursue opportunities in Japan, China, Korea and India.

Comcast-owned white-label video management and publishing company, thePlatform, on Monday evening launched mpx Beta, which it bills as a "radically re-engineered video management system designed to deliver an unmatched combination of efficiency and scalability for publishing online video"; and also unveiled a complementary mpx Dev Kit. The launches were scheduled to coincide with thePlatform's 10th anniversary.