Orca Interactive, a global market leader in developing middleware and applications for IPTV, announced that its new Interactive Alliance IPTV partner program is gaining momentum with the addition of eight new companies.

"The momentum of our Interactive Alliance underscores the necessity for tested, open and interoperable solutions," said Eyal Adanya, director of business development, Orca Interactive. "We welcome the cooperation and integration with these IPTV industry leaders to ensure the success of IPTV services for broadband network operators and service providers and ultimately subscriber satisfaction worldwide."

New partners have joined the Interactive Alliance in the following tracks:

-- TECHNOLOGY: New partners include broadcast and media-on-demand software company, Streaming21, and content security provider, Irdeto, which provides comprehensive solutions for digital content protection in digital TV, IPTV and mobile environments. The two companies join existing technology partners BitBand Technologies, Nagravision, Verimatrix and Widevine.

-- APPLICATION: New application partners include InLive Interactive, an interactive television software developer. inLive Interactive is a leading provider of Mass participation(R) solutions (IMPS), enabling large numbers of viewers to simultaneously experience the fun and adventure of true continuous interaction with television programming. Also, Orca welcomes Accedo Broadband, a leading aggregator of interactive content and applications for IPTV and broadband enabled consumer electronics. Accedo provides the largest available multi-platform portfolio of TV-centric applications, Accedo Application Portfolio(TM). inLive and Accedo join existing application partners GooMe and Emblaze-VCON.

-- SUBSCRIBER USER INTERFACE: SUI partners new to the Interactive Alliance are iPanel, a provider of embedded Internet solutions for interactive digital television, and Texas Instruments, a developer of DSP-based digital media processors for IPTV. Existing SUI partners include Amino, ANT, Humax, Kreatel, Opera and Setabox.

-- INTEGRATION: BCC, one of the top 10 Russian consulting companies in the field of development and system integration, has joined the integration partners DigiEyeZ, HP, IBM, Indra, Lucent, and Open Technologies.

"Our participation in Orca's Interactive Alliance gives us the independency we need to streamline the installation, customization and maintenance of IPTV services with our new customer SibirTelecom," said Dmitry Gokov, VP Professional Services, Open Technologies. "Orca's SI-enabled approach and ready-made integration enabled a smooth service launch and will continue to seamlessly serve SibirTelecom's upgrade needs in the future."

"The flexibility in user interface creation and application offering was very important to us in our choice of IPTV middleware," said Nils Overgaard, CEO, ComX Holding. "Leveraging the solutions offered to the Interactive Alliance partners, our integrators DigiEyeZ, were able to quickly develop a customized UI for us and develop advanced applications such as TV based email. This allowed us to increase our subscriber numbers as well as their level of usage and satisfaction."

The Interactive Alliance was developed to provide pre-certified, complete and interoperable IPTV solutions that are open and reliable. Members and their Telco and service provider customers can leverage the pre-integrated solutions to reduce vendor dependency, achieve rapid time to market and decrease total cost of ownership. They are guaranteed system interoperability and performance with tested, proven solutions.

The Alliance provides partners with everything they need to leverage the success of Orca's RiGHTv open platform solution, including state-of-the-art development tools, documentation training and support, and joint marketing activities.