Orca Interactive, a global market leader in developing middleware and applications for IPTV, announced the release of Orca RiGHTv 4.5 with an evolution of the middleware's architecture into a Service Delivery Platform (SDP), a service creation and delivery system for accelerating time to market of interactive TV applications and services.

In the fast growing IPTV industry, operators need to respond to changes in the market and in consumer needs and behavior. Orca's RiGHTv SDP environment answers this need by providing the service control and flexibility for operators to quickly and easily introduce an unlimited number of revenue generating and targeted services and applications from various vendors, thus reducing operation cost, cost of ownership and business risk. The integrated TV experience of multiple applications increases customer satisfaction and loyalty and allows service bundling for pricing and promotion.

Orca's SDP serves as an integration hub for the 3rd party application developers with the OSS / BSS (operational and business support systems), the IPTV value chain components such as video servers, CA/DRM and encoders, and the set-top boxes (STBs) in use in the households. By allowing operators to rapidly evolve their IPTV service, with minimum service integration overhead, the SDP reduces the cost of building and managing services on the IPTV network.

"Orca continues to lead the middleware product segment with a first of its kind SDP architecture for IPTV," said Yosi Glick, vice president of marketing and business development, Orca Interactive. "It's hard to predict what will be the next killer app. So rather than trying to identify such hard-to-anticipate applications, we allow operators to deliver a broad mix of services that address varying trends and consumer needs. This allows operators to increase subscriber loyalty and revenues."

Orca IPTV SDP provides the vertical video element within the full quadruple-play converged SDP that manages video, data, audio, and wireless application delivery. Orca's IPTV SDP uses the converged SDP J2EE-based engine, and connects to the operator's OSS/BSS through it. The Converged SDP is a critical enabler for IMS (IP multimedia Subsystem) as it forms the creation and management environment for multimedia services and applications.

Orca IPTV SDP provides the following features:

• Centralized application loading and registration
• SUI SDK development environment for operators, system integrators and application developers, including tools for embedding applications from various vendors into the existing SUI
• Flexible integration with OSS/BSS using documented standard API
• Service business model management
• Subscriber profile management, with targeted pricing per group of users
• Integration with IPTV value chain - CA/DRM, Video servers, encoders, STBs
• Plug-in for CA/DRM and Video Servers
• Built-in IPTV applications: Live TV, EPG, PVR, VOD, SVOD, PPV, Home Media
• Self-service for registration to new applications by the subscriber