At its first meeting, the members of the Broadband Services Forum (BSF) set the direction of the group's future initiatives. Project work on IPTV and dynamic and interactive services such as gaming and video were given top priority by a poll of the meeting's attendees. "Content-to-go" was another area on which the BSF membership wanted to focus. These areas will top the BSF's agenda in 2005.

Verizon is rolling out the industry's premier consumer broadband services to many of its customers in the Franconia, Leesburg, McLean, Springfield and Tyson’s Corner areas. The new services currently are available to customers in Annandale, Falls Church and adjacent areas of Arlington and Fairfax counties. The company is offering three tiers of service with approximate downstream (download) speeds of up to 5, 15 and 30 Mbps (megabits per second).

Verizon is rolling out the industry's premier consumer broadband services to many of its customers in the borough of Newtown, and the townships of Newtown, Lower Makefield, Middleton, Northhampton and Wrightstown. The new services currently are available to customers in the boroughs of Doylestown and New Britain and the townships of Buckingham, Doylestown, New Britain, Plumstead and Warwick. The company is offering three tiers of service with approximate downstream (download) speeds of up to 5, 15 and 30 Mbps (megabits per second).

Verizon is rolling out the industry's premier consumer broadband services to many of its customers in the borough of West Chester and townships of Birmingham, East Bradford, East Goshen, West Goshen, West Whiteland and Westtown. The new services currently are available to customers in the borough of Downingtown and the townships of West Bradford, East Brandywine, Caln, East Caln, Charlestown, West Pikeland and Uwchlan. The company is offering three tiers of service with approximate downstream (download) speeds of up to 5, 15 and 30 Mbps (megabits per second).

Verizon is rolling out the industry’s premier consumer broadband services to customers in Andover, Bedford, Belmont, Burlington, Hopkinton, Lynnfield, North Reading and Topsfield. The company is offering three tiers of service with approximate downstream (download) speeds of up to 5, 15 and 30 Mbps (megabits per second).

Verizon customers in Massapequa, Wantagh, Franklin Square, Port Washington and Oyster Bay now can experience high-speed Internet access as the company begins to offer its Verizon FiOS (FYE’-ose) Internet Service to homes here.

Verizon customers in five additional Westchester County communities and one additional Rockland County community now can experience breathtaking high-speed Internet access as the company begins to offer its Verizon FiOS (FYE’-ose) Internet Service to homes here.

Verizon is rolling out the industry’s premier consumer broadband services to many of its customers in the Westchester County communities of Harrison, Scarsdale, Katonah, Bedford Village and Dobbs Ferry, as well as the Rockland County community of Orangeburg. The company is offering three tiers of service with approximate downstream (download) speeds of up to 5, 15 and 30 Mbps (megabits per second).

Verizon customers in parts of Brandon, Alafia and Carrollwood now can experience extremely high-speed Internet access as the company begins to offer its Verizon FiOS (FYE’-ose) Internet Service to homes here.

Verizon is rolling out the industry’s premier consumer broadband services to most of its customers in these areas. Meanwhile, it is readying at least eight other geographic areas in its west central Florida service territory for FiOS availability. The company is offering three tiers of service with approximate downstream (download) speeds of up to 5, 15 and 30 Mbps (megabits per second).

Zetools^TM, Inc., Tarari® Inc., and Digital Rapids^TM announced the immediate availability of Alloy^TM, an end-to-end solution to enable producers and distributors of digital media to accelerate and streamline the creation and distribution of content for any Internet-enabled (IP) platform. AllOY combines content capture, accelerated encoding, automated authoring and publishing, and secure UDP distribution into a single package. With AllOY, production processes that used to take an experienced technical team days to accomplish can now be done by a single production intern in minutes. AllOY will be shown for the first time in the Digital Rapids booth (#SL5331) and the Microsoft booth (#SL332) at the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB2005) in Las Vegas, April 18-21, 2005.

The European Union is looking to leverage electric power supply to offer high-speed Internet access. The EU released a recommendation last Friday that provides guidelines on using electric power cables to carry electronic communication data.

IDV GMOD subscribers will be able to access entertainment and educational programs from around the world and play the most advanced video games from any publisher. U.S. citizens will be able to tune in Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" monologues from wherever there is broadband access; basketball fans in China or anywhere in the world will be able to pull up a Yao Ming game they missed or want to see again; foreign nationals will be able to watch programming anywhere in their native language.

With the introduction of its newest encoders, the 4Caster^TM Mobile and the 4Coder^TM HD system families, Envivio Inc. becomes the first and only company powering MPEG-4 broadcast video services from mobile to high definition. New systems will debut at NAB2005 in the Envivio® booth #SL 3310 and are available today. Today enterprises, telcos and broadcasters use Envivio systems for video applications such as elearning, IPTV, multimedia broadcasting, and the broadcast of SD and HD television. The newest encoders, like all Envivio systems, offer the most advanced implementation of the MPEG-4 (including AVC / H.264) specification to provide the best video quality at the lowest possible bit rate.

ManiaTv! is currently touring the country visiting more than 90 college campuses to promote the first strictly based Internet TV music station. By handing out T-shirts and other promotional items, ManiaTV! is hoping to get the word out about the free alternative to MTV and VH1 to anyone with an Internet connection.

ManiaTV! claims to be more like the original MTV with no half-hour shows. Instead, there shows are only 15 to 20 minutes long. Unlike their TV counterparts ManiaTV has commercials every couple hours instead of every 10 minutes.

Narrowstep Inc, creators of TV Station in a Box, which enables content owners and narrowcasters to create their own IPTV networks over broadband, will introduce the TelVOS^TM operating system at the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB) in Vegas (April 18-21).

TelVOS^TM is a comprehensive platform for the development and deployment of IPTV services to mobile phones, wireless devices, point of sale, point of information, broadband TV and broadcast.

PixelPlay and Atari, Inc. announced an agreement whereby PixelPlay will create and publish four classic Atari games and four Hasbro board game brands for interactive television platforms in the U.S. and Canada. PixelPlay is the leading provider of entertainment and state-of-the-art technology for emerging platforms including interactive television, broadband, IPTV, and mobile devices worldwide. PixelPlay will integrate notable Hasbro brands, including SCRABBLE, YAHTZEE, MONOPOLY, and BOGGLE, as well as Atari's original arcade games, Centipede^TM, Asteroids^TM, Missile Command^TM and Breakout®, reviving these classic games for its interactive television subscribers.