More Than 20 Companies Participate in Latest
CableLabs® ETV Interop
Representatives from 21companies, ranging from manufacturers, application developers, and implementers to cable operators, worked together to test the latest engineering changes to the ETV and OpenCable™ Content Definition Format (CoDF) Specifications. These attendees also were able to evaluate the interoperability of ETV applications and ETV user agents compliant with the I05 ETV specifications, as well as candidate features of the I06 version of the ETV specifications.
"These efforts demonstrated a significant amount of progress for the industry on I06 as well as on the CoDF specs," said Don Dulchinos, Senior Vice President of Advertising & Interactive Services at CableLabs.
Companies that participated in the interop included: Alticast, Backchannel Media, BigBand Networks, Comcast, Cox, Ensequence, EnableTV, Fourthwall Media, Inc.; HSN, icueTV Inc.; Ligos Corporation, Microsoft, PVI Virtual Media Services, LLC; RCDb, S3 Group, Softel USA, Starz, Strategy & Technology, Time Warner Cable, Unisoft, and Zodiac Interactive.
Collectively these companies brought varied capabilities to this interop, such as ETV applications, user agents, streamers and schedulers, test environments and authoring tools. The versatility of the ETV platform was reflected in application types including RFI, t-commerce, premium upsell, VOD navigation, social networking and cross-platform messaging.As with past CableLabs interops, the week included one day of demonstrations by the participants for an audience of cable operators.
George Peden, Ensequence Director of Services, was very pleased with the convergence of the ETV User Agents in the interop. "We brought the award winning Showtime Sports Interactive EBIF application to the interop and we were able to get it working successfully across all of the user agents."
On Thursday during the interop, a record number of industry guests from numerous cable operators and network programmers were treated to demonstrations showing some exciting and creative ways to use EBIF™ to enhance the consumers' viewing experience. "This interop is very timely since Comcast and other operators are going to market now with EBIF-based interactive applications, both on our own and in support of Canoe Ventures' interactive applications," said Steve Reynolds, Senior Vice President, Premises Technology, at Comcast, and chair of the CableLabs Executive Technical Team overseeing the development and extension of the EBIF platform.
CableLabs' interoperability events provide vendors with an informal, laboratory setting in which they have the opportunity to test their latest products within CableLabs' headends and testing environment, determine compliance with industry specifications and the ability of their products to interoperate with other devices in an end-to-end system.
Information on all CableLabs activities focused on ETV may be found at www.ebif.tv. Vendors working on ETV applications should contact Sheila Keller, s.keller@cablelabs.com, Vendor Relations Program Coordinator at CableLabs, for information on how to participate in future events. About CableLabs: Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry. A non-profit research and development consortium, CableLabs delivers innovations that enable cable operators to be the providers of choice in their markets. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org and www.ebif.tv.
CableLabs® is a registered trademark of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. Other CableLabs marks are listed at http://www.cablelabs.com/certqual/trademarks. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
