Help is at hand. Alcatel-Lucent says its Interactive Media Manager (IMM) now supports the two main standards-based platforms in the cable industry, EBIF and tru2way technologies.
EBIF is designed to work with legacy set-top boxes reaching millions of homes with existing digital cable TV services. Tru2way is a technology that is a full OpenCable environment and is the next evolution of cable TV with even more advanced interactive TV services. Cable operators that have announced support for the tru2way platform represent about 80% of all US cable subscribers, says Alcatel-Lucent.
With IMM, it says, cable operators, content providers, and media agencies can create new interactive TV applications such as enhanced TV (voting, competitions, and polls) or interactive advertisements to augment the broadcast experience. This will allow users to engage with the content and brand of their choice via interactivity enabled by the IMM.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs is developing an array of interactive applications to provide mobile, call back, and other digital media redemption capabilities to the brands and advertisers.
By providing a design/authoring environment together with a set of templates and functionality, the IMM will enable the creation and management of unlimited interactive applications for multiple platforms and devices.
This will make it possible, says the company, to write an application once that can be deployed many times, giving the content providers and media agencies a simplified creation and management environment.
