Wegener Corporation, a leading provider of products for television, audio and data distribution networks worldwide, today announced the integration of ANT's next generation TV browser and client framework in the WEGENER IPTV set top box.

ANT recently launched the Galio Client, the world's first TV Application Manager to support TV on Demand, Video on Demand, Digital Video Recorder & EPG services in addition to walled garden web applications and general internet support. With Galio, clients can fully customize the presentation of services and provide consistency across multiple consumer devices. The Galio architecture will provide programmers extensive opportunities for cross- platform branding based UI advertising.

"ANT values WEGENER's ability to provide MPEG-4 IPTV single chip set-top boxes and work with us to complete this rapid integration project," stated Stephen Reeder, Head of Product Strategy for ANT plc. "We look forward to building upon this technology partnership."

Launching video services to high-speed Internet customers is part of a "triple play" strategy for telephone companies to increase service offerings to subscribers. The highly rated SMD-515 IPTV set top from WEGENER supports MPEG-4/h.264 and MPEG-2 decoding. The IP set top fully supports both SD and HD video, optional PVR and rapid integration of 3rd party applications. MPEG- 4/h.264 is an advanced video compression scheme seen as a key enabler to drive large scale deployments of video services, such as multi-channel broadcasts, video-on-demand and HD programming.

"This project shows the strength of our open architecture platform," stated Ned Mountain, President of WEGENER. "We are delighted that ANT trusted WEGENER with this important IPTV set top integration of Galio."