S&T and FourthWall Media partner for expansion in growing EBIF industry
Boulder, CO, September 15th, 2011: Strategy & Technology (S&T), a leader in technologies for interactive television, announced today its partnership with FourthWall Media to integrate key features of each company’s EBIF tools. These bundled offerings will include the FourthWall User Agent into S&T’s TSMonitor product, S&T’s TSBinder integrated with FourthWall’s Ad Widgets®, and the S&T Carousel Streamer with FourthWall’s TV Widgets®.
The partnership enables both S&T and FourthWall the ability to deliver a complete, end-to-end offering of complimentary products for interactive television applications. S&T’s TSMonitor, developed in collaboration with FourthWall, is the first scalable ETV application monitoring tool, integrated with FourthWall’s EBIF User Agent and application development environment. FourthWall’s EBIF platform has become the industry standard for ETV deployments on thin client set-top boxes, offering the first EBIF User Agent developed to run on legacy Cisco/Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes as well as Motorola and tru2way environments.
S&T’s TSBinder software is used to generate early-bound EBIF ads, binding the advert to the digital video content with which it is associated, allowing FourthWall’s Ad Widgets to deliver a growing suite of addressable interactive advertising applications and data that marketers can leverage to drive sales. These include Billboards, Voting & Polling, Request for Information, Click-to-Call, VOD Telescoping, Microsites, MSO Cross-Sell/Up-Sell, and T-Commerce.
S&T’s Carousel Streamer, like its big brother TSBroadcaster®, generates EBIF data carousels and encodes them into MPEG-2 transport streams, and delivers them in-band to provide unbound EBIF applications available across all services on the platform. The Carousel Streamer is the application delivery technology integrated with FourthWall’s TV Widgets. TV Widgets are interactive applications that viewers can easily download to their set-top boxes. The applications can then retrieve content from predefined sources, and then display the content on the TV screen. Viewers can see and interact with the applications, making their TV experience more engaging and immersive.
“S&T is pleased to be partnering with FourthWall to deliver a richer interactive TV offering to our customers. S&T and FourthWall’s products are naturally complimentary and this partnership will provide a set of enhanced tools and services for robust EBIF application delivery and monitoring,” said Adrian Fowkes, CTO Americas at S&T.
“FourthWall Media is equally pleased to partner with S&T,” said Mike Israel, FourthWall COO. “Our products dovetail perfectly with theirs and offer the cable operator the companion tools they will need to take advantage of the growing and soon to be ubiquitous EBIF platform. We look forward to our new partnership that will work so effectively for all parties in the iTV ecosystem.”
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About S&T
Strategy & Technology (S&T) is headquartered in London, UK with S&T Americas in Boulder, CO (USA) and S&T Hong Kong. Developing and implementing technology based on public standards in digital TV since 1996, S&T supports EBIF/ETV, tru2way, MHEG, HbbTV, carousel generation and playout, processing and monitoring, as well as receiver software and interactive applications for European standards. S&T was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade in 2010. Further information can be found at www.americas.s-and-t.com and www.s-and-t.com.
About FourthWall Media
FourthWall Media™ is the market leader in next generation interactive television and media measurement solutions. The company’s EBIF portfolio includes AdAim™ Audience Measurement Suite, Ad Widgets® end-to-end advertising system, TV Widgets® which include eBay on TV, sports applications such as My Football Tracker®, My Basketball Tracker® and My Baseball Tracker®, Bill Pay on TV, The TV Buy Button with PayPal, Yellow Pages on TV; and an EBIF technology platform for Cisco, Motorola, and tru2way set-top boxes. It also includes FourthWall’s cloud-based AirCommand™ gateway that connects external devices to digital cable set-top boxes. The Company’s differentiated technology capable of running on all set-top boxes over existing infrastructure gives FourthWall the unique ability to deliver the census-level audience measurement needed to unlock the vast potential of TV’s advanced advertising business. FourthWall Media products and technology are distributed through partnerships with Comcast Media Center, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Brighthouse Networks, Rovi, DISH Network, and numerous other operators reaching over 24 million set-top boxes. Learn more at www.fourthwallmedia.tv.
TSBroadcaster is a trademark of Strategy & Technology Limited. FourthWall Media, TV Widgets,and Ad Widgets are trademarks of FourthWall Media. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
S&T press contact:
Jennie Evans
Manor Marketing
Tel: +44 (0)1635 44991
jennie@manormarketing.tv
S&T company contact:
Kate Chaux
Tel: +1 303 827 9013
kate.chaux@s-and-t.com
FourthWall Media contact:
John Totaro
Tel: +1 917 859 4873
jtotaro@fourthwallmedia.tv