Orca Interactive announces its entry into the U.S. market and first U.S. customer win with W.T. Services. The solution provides W.T.Services with integrated, carrier-grade IPTV services including live television broadcast, pay-per-view and video on demand. Marking its entrance into the U.S. market, Orca Interactive is also announcing the opening of a U.S. office.

W.T. Services' advanced new IPTV services, powered by Orca's RiGHTv middleware, also include Caller ID over television, enabling W.T. Services' triple play subscribers to conveniently identify incoming calls on their TV screens, and Emergency Alert System notification for advance warnings and immediate, direct alerts about critical events in the region.

The continued growth of the global IPTV industry, specifically in Europe, Asia and North America, hinges upon the misunderstood "Middleware" that glues together the many working parts of the IPTV end-to-end system. "Without flexible middleware that can easily and predictably increase the number of subscribers and the breadth of services, IPTV operators will not sustain long-term growth or stability," states Steve Hawley, MRG Sr. Analyst. "Middleware can make or break the success of an IPTV service."

Although "fast channel change" is discussed, it is only one of many issues reviewed in this definitive report. "Growing their IPTV services from the basic stage, through intermediate, advanced and eventually, the 'converged' stage (where video, wireless and wireline services are all integrated) is what IPTV operators really need to accomplish -- all within carefully defined bandwidth and financial budgets," states Len Feldman, Director of IPTV Analysis for MRG. "This report shows how to accomplish this either with existing or new middleware."

Teracue has introduced the new software version 4.0 of the iCue streaming system for recording, distribution, playback and for the management of video streams over standard IP networks. iCue stands for flexible and instant video networking for both PCs and TVs - in DVD-quality. The iCue Server, first version introduced in 2001, is now around 20 percent stronger and has graphically improved operator and user interfaces.

Sophisticated features for archiving and rights management as well as streaming playback of individual video frames for video analysis and high-detail recognition are now possible. Normal Ethernet networks with CAT 5 cabling are able to serve as “virtual video routers” and render additional video cabling and separate signal amplification and switching unnecessary. The iCue software supports the compression standards MPEG-4 AVC H.264 SD/HD and MPEG-2 SD/HD.

Asia’s leading IP solutions provider BNS has unveiled its new Nautilus Middleware platform designed to power IP based video services such as IPTV, Internet TV and MDU IPTV.

Highly flexible and field proven, Nautilus Middleware is cost effective and quick to deploy and includes all major backend modules such as billing, content management / scheduling, and subscriber management.

Built on a decision tree based architecture, Nautilus facilitates price and service plan flexibility and high performance real time rating and billing for virtually any IP based service. This enables operators to dramatically shorten the product development cycle and time to market for new service plans.

Minerva and Advanced Digital Broadcast announce the certification and immediate availability of Minerva's iTVManager IPTV services management platform and ADB's new ADB-3800W high definition IPTV set-top box. This solution will enable telcos to deliver television services to their subscribers using standard definition, HD, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats.

"Without HD services, IPTV operators have been at a disadvantage relative to their cable and satellite competition. This integrated solution levels the playing field," stated Jean-Georges Fritsch, COO of Minerva Networks. "ADB has been a terrific partner in this process and our customers will be pleased with the results. Minerva is proud to have ADB as a fully certified HD/H.264 STB partner."

ADB has already won two international industry awards for its HD/Advanced Video Coding IPTV technology and is the leader in hybrid IPTV STB deployments in Europe. This initiative marks its entry into the North American IPTV market.

ON Telecoms is using Orca's RiGHTv middleware in a pioneering Greek IPTV deployment. In four months from engagement to launch, ON Telecoms began offering an attractive triple play package for customers in January 2007, including live TV (hybrid of DVB-T and IP channels), on-demand services such as video on demand and super fast broadband up to 10 Mbps. The service uses MPEG-4 technology and can provide channels in Standard Definition or High Definition quality.

mPhase Technologies, will explain the advantages of its software in a video on YouTube this Thursday, March 8th at 1 p.m. mPhase's TV+ System facilitates the addition of new services by network operators.

mPhase Technologies has posted video demonstrations of its ultra sensitive magnetometer on February 23rd and earlier its nanobattery on the YouTube website recently.

The "As You Like It Services Platform" is the third video production the company has produced to help interested people understand both the mPhase technology and the company's potential markets.

Accedo Broadband and WorldMadeChannel, a user generated TV channel, have partnered to bring a new on-demand experience to Accedo's IPTV offering.

The WorldMadeChannel On Demand service contains thousands of videos created by consumers all over the world, packaged for quick and intuitive usage on TV. The content is structured in categories such as children, animals, nature and sports, and is constantly updated with new videos, which have been selected through a quality and content validation process. This partnership will give consumers the possibility to offer their own TV channel.

SeaChange International has secured a new patent for a software application that offers a solution to the challenge of presenting television viewers with the content they want to watch. U.S. Patent 7,155,674 is embodied in SeaChange's Channel Overlay application, which organizes a subscriber's experience according to programs currently being watched.

Triggered by a remote control command, the application overlays video with a menu of hotlinks to relevant on-demand content options and linear broadcast channels.

Northport AB is to provide Salaten Bredband AS with its ModulutionT Platform, that will be used to manage Salten Bredbands Interactive TV services. Northport's ModulutionT platform will replace Salten Bredbands current environment that has been in operation since 2003.

Northport will integrate the Modulution platform in Salten Bredbands existing IPTV environment, which consists of IPTV STBs from Motorola, Conditional Access from Latens Systems and IPTV Headend from Tandberg Television.

At CSTB 2007 show, SecureMedia and Netris JSC announced that the companies have fully integrated SecureMedia's Encryptonite ONETM System CA/DRM software solution with Netris's IPSoft iVision IPTV Middleware.

Today the majority of IPTV deployments in Russia are using Netris' IPSoft iVision IPTV Middleware as a core element of their IPTV network solutions.

Netris and Central Telegraph, a Russian telecommunications company, announced a successful IPSoft iVision IPTV Middleware deployment as a core platform for digital television service delivery for Central Telegraph' United Multiservice Network (QWERTY network) subscribers. According to a long-term agreement, Netris has deployed its platform for interactive service delivery, IPSoft iVision IPTV Middleware, and will provide to Central Telegraph ongoing support and future development services.

NDS announced two new product enhancements of Synamedia Metro, the NDS IPTV middleware solution. Distributed-DVR and ShareTV are two patent pending product features which will deliver even more to IPTV service providers who choose Synamedia Metro to protect and enhance their business. The middleware and content protection attributes of NDS Synamedia Metro combined with the power of Jungo's Open RG software, bring peer-to-peer video sharing and distributed DVR capabilities to IPTV operators.

Dreampark and Accedo Broadband announced a new partnership today to further strengthen the appeal and opportunities with the Dreamgallery IPTV middleware. The new partnership will provide operators with a wide range of revenue-generating and differentiating interactive services that are already customized and pre-integrated into the Dreampark middleware solution.

The Accedo Application Portfolio includes value added services such as Karaoke on Demand, casual games, quizzes, puzzles, VideoArt, horoscope and comics, as well as mail and chat services made exclusively for IPTV.

Norwegian IPTV operator Comvie, a privately owned company, has selected Dreampark as IPTV middleware provider. Comvie, which is a relatively new IPTV operator in the Norwegian IPTV market, aims to be one of the leading providers of two-way multimedia services in Norway.

Comvie has chosen to work with Dreampark and its DreamgalleryT IPTV Middleware. The product, DreamgalleryT, includes interactive services, Video On Demand, non-linear TV, and Network PVR services.