Rovi, FourthWall Partner On Cable Widgets Platform

By Greg Tarr -- TWICE, 2/8/2010

Santa Clara, Calif. - Rovi and FourthWall Media said Monday that they have formed a partnership to provide technology interactive enhancements to cable TV operations.

The collaboration will deliver new interactive solutions to connect advertisers and programmers with audiences.

The combination of FourthWall's Enhanced TV (ETV) platform and TV Widgets with Rovi's Guide offers service providers standards-based interactive television and applications throughout North and South America.

In 2010, Rovi will begin to offer an integrated ETV Platform, including FourthWall Media's Enhanced Television Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) user agent, ETV server, and TV widgets as part of Rovi's guide solutions.

The EBIF represents a standards-based platform for enhanced television that allows providers to provide targeted and interactive advertising, and interactive television widgets and applications across legacy and next-generation digital set-top boxes.

Rovi's ETV platform is designed to simplify the implementation of new applications, making it easier for service providers to bring more advanced features to consumers.

Under the agreement, Rovi will include in its guides an initial set of pre-integrated TV widgets from FourthWall, including eBay on TV, Yellow Pages on TV, news, weather, and numerous sports widgets for many major league, teams and colleges.

Each TV widget can be hyper-personalized, turning the television into an interactive, tailored experience for the viewer.

The integrated solution will also enable service providers to launch new EBIF applications developed by third parties.

The company's said Rovi program guides with FourthWall's EBIF platform and applications will be integrated into set-top boxes from Motorola, Cisco and Pace.