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January 2001 Issue

Pulse: OpenTV Accelerates ITV
By , Associate Editor, and , Deployment Editor

A deal with Motorola is giving OpenTV a foothold in the U.S. interactive TV (ITV) market.

The pact between the two companies resulted in a series of agreements focused on accelerating ITV, including the formation of a joint venture that will include cable and satellite integration, testing and deployment. Motorola has tapped OpenTV as a preferred ITV partner and its Device Mosaic Web browser will be installed in Motorola’s next generation digital set-top box, the DCT-5000.

Including OpenTV software will help multiple system operators (MSOs) quickly provide more applications, says Motorola’s Senior Director of Marketing and Systems Engineering Mark DePietro.

"This deal will help enhance the (MSO’s) choices," he says.

OpenTV’s President and COO James Ackerman agrees. "These agreements combine the strengths of two ITV leaders," he said in a statement.

Ackerman may be on to something. OpenTV’s push for a piece of the U.S. market is a logical progression of its success in more than 50 countries where its middleware has been installed in more that 11 million digital set-top boxes, a figure it says is more than all its competitors combined.

OpenTV officially broke into the U.S. market with an agreement to deploy in U.S. Media Group’s Northern California system.

OpenTV’s plan is to build a solid technical format, provide professional service and help build and deliver interactive content, says Anup Murarka, OpenTV’s vice president of strategic and product marketing.

Elsewhere in Middleware

Meanwhile, in related news:

• Thomson Multimedia and Sony Europe are each taking 3 percent equity stakes in Canal Plus Technologies. Both are charter licensees of a new Canal Plus middleware. Thomson is also cooperating on ITV software and content protection.
• Microsoft has struck deals to integrate its MSTV platform with ITV content and business enablers RespondTV, ACTV and Two Way TV. It is also launching an interactive service with Thomson Multimedia.
• Liberate launched a $50 million investment fund and made an initial $7 million investment in Two Way TV. Liberate also created an ITV performance lab supported by Sun Microsystems and Cisco.
• Worldgate and nCUBE are creating a hypertext markup language (HTML) navigator for Worldgate’s ITV platform to enable selection, through Motorola’s DCT-2000 set-tops, of movies housed on nCUBE’s streaming media appliances.
• PowerTV has licensed SoftConnex Technologies’ universal serial bus (USB) host stack for integration into the PowerTV operating system to facilitate data exchanges between peripheral devices and the set-top.

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