Espial®, a leading provider of client IPTV applications and middleware, announced the availability of the Espial Portal Content Development Kit (Portal CDK), a PC-based tool that complements the Espial ® Escape ^TM browser for developing interactive content services for IPTV subscribers.

To help operators generate services, Portal CDK simulates the rendering of content with Espial Escape on a set-top box. It allows developers the convenience of creating content within their PC-environment and ensures that the display and behavior will appear the same way it's intended on any Espial Escape-based set-top box.

"The Portal CDK will prove invaluable to content developers who need to reduce time-to-market and avoid costly content validation for a comprehensive on-demand content service program, such as MTS TV On Demand" says Dean Staples, Senior Product Design Manager at Manitoba Telecom Services Inc, a Canadian Telco deploying IPTV.

Providing portal content services is an important competitive advantage within any IPTV environment. It can help to differentiate an operator's IPTV offering, build a model to generate new revenue from subscriptions to services such as games, news, weather or sports portals, and improve consumer loyalty so the operator can Own the IPTV Subscriber.

"The Portal CDK tool helps IACTA make our Games4TV take full advantage of all of the things Espial Escape can do on a set-top box," said Laura Buddine, CEO of Iacta LLC., a content developer. "This new tool also was extremely helpful as we developed our new CAST portal to deploy on Espial Escape. We believe that using open standards to create content and interactive applications will be a critical component in the success of this industry. "

Espial Portal CDK accurately simulates the advanced support for the latest standards found in Espial Escape, including HTML 4.0, DHTML, JavaScript 1.5, CSS2, DOM0, DOM1, DOM2 Events, Applets and SSL/TLS. Additionally, Escape's unique portal rendering mode is leveraged so content behaves like an application rather than a static web page. Additional support is included for GIF, JPEG, PNG, and Macromedia ® Flash ® 6.0 that's optimized for TV, plus RTL and internationalization.

"Espial's experience in the content creation environment demonstrates that generating revenue from content services means being able to deploy new and exciting content services to subscribers on a regular basis," said Dilshan De Silva, Marketing Director for Espial's Browser Business. "It's far too time consuming for a content developer to make several visits to the lab each time they would like to roll out a new service, so with the addition of the Portal CDK tools, developers save time deploying new services and fresh new content can be added quickly and effectively."

The Espial Portal Content Development Kit is available now for Windows and Linux based-PCs. Please visit the Espial Web site for more details about how this service can start accelerating the development of your new portal services.

Espial will be showcasing the Espial Portal Content Development Kit at IBC from September 9th to 13th in Amsterdam at Hall 4, Stand 374.