Orca Interactive, a global market leader in developing middleware and applications for IPTV, announced the development of a new IPTV user interface using Macromedia® Flash® 6, to deliver a new compelling, interactive user experience for the broadband television industry.

The new SUI helps operators and service providers to attract subscribers to the interactive world of IPTV where subscribers actively define content and schedules, thus increasing usage and revenues. It provides an optimal user experience for IPTV with minimal interference with the television viewing experience to increase satisfaction of content offering and reduce customer churn due to an addictive user experience.

"The new SUI represents an evolution rather than a revolution occurring in television, where we need to support a learning curve for viewers," said Yosi Glick, vice president of marketing and business development, Orca Interactive. "TV users have strong existing viewing habits, their first priority is watching TV programs. So our new SUI is designed to easily integrate into the TV experience and provide an intuitive, use-based flow that avoids distracting or disorienting viewers and supports the transition from linear programming to on-demand viewing."

The use of Macromedia Flash provides multiple advantages for SUI development, including a streamlined look and feel with high quality visual effects and animation delivered at optimum performance levels. Flash development is fast and simple, thus reducing costs, minimizing risks and speeding time-to-market of IPTV services. It opens up the development of interactive TV interfaces to the wide-spread community of Flash developers, resulting in service control and cost reduction, and making available a huge resource of rich interactive content, games and applications

The new SUI features two components - IPTV Dashboard and MyTV:

--The IPTV Dashboard supports segmentation of the infrastructure, enabling a separate dashboard for different subscribers in the household. As TV is not necessarily a personal device and often provides entertainment to multiple viewers in the household, the SUI supports the watching modes of single and multiple individuals. It includes multiple family functionalities, from parental control over content and budget to merging of subscriber specific contents to joint content.

The IPTV Dashboard enables personalization, including the capability to add personalized information tickers to live TV, to help operators reduce customer churn. It also responds to subscriber needs while watching TV by providing recommendations to current programs based on subscriber preferences and operator strategy, customized EPG for simple and quick navigation, quick access to the subscriber saved VOD and PVR content, and interactive applications, time shifting and recordings of live programs.

--MyTV provides a central interface for subscriber control over content selection and scheduling and incorporates various applications as VOD, SVOD, PPV and PVR in to a single solution. MyTV provides search and save capabilities, a subscriber library and account management.