Sigma Systems announces enhancements to its Residential Video Solution for IPTV for telecom service providers, including enabling delivery of VOD, advanced advertising, and DVR/PVR. Sigma's Residential Video Solution for IPTV is a finalist in the Best IPTV Service Delivery Platform category of the IPTV World Series Awards at IPTV World Forum.

NeuLion and the Professional Bull Riders have reaffirmed their partnership to continue serving fans throughout 2009. Powered by NeuLion, the Professional Bull Riders' PBR.TV launched in October 2008 for the PBR World Finals with a content mix that included: extensive event highlights from each round of competition, daily podcasts, live streaming coverage, original event content, plus archives from the past season and previous finals.

The Broadband Forum announces the latest IPTV and broadband statistics, showing that the North American IPTV market has more than doubled in size in 2008 -- with growth of 113 percent despite the global economic downturn.

The report, prepared for the Forum by industry analysts Point Topic, also showed a very healthy 19 percent growth of IPTV inside the last quarter, well ahead of other IPTV-focused regions South and East Asia and Latin America, whose last quarter growth both showed 12 percent.

Brightcove announces a series of major customer wins in Japan, including Tokyo Broadcasting System, Sony Music Network, Asahi Breweries Group, Shueisha Publishing Co., and Orange Page Inc. The rapid adoption of the company’s platform in Japan continues to accelerate Brightcove’s global expansion and build on a customer base that includes leading media companies and marketers across North America and Europe.

Parks Associates announce telecom consulting firm Pivot Media will host a pre-show event Telecom Executive Summit@CONNECTIONS: Digital DNA for Service Providers on the first day of CONNECTIONS: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase.

CONNECTIONS will take place June 2-4, 2009, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This executive conference and showcase attracts senior executives from all industries associated with the digital home, new media and content distribution, and mobile applications and services.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "IPTV Business Case: The Blue-Ocean Still Murky in Parts" to their offering. This research service compare the IPTV business case, service deployment, marketing strategies of the service providers in Asia Pacific and major players in Europe and USA. It also provides an insight of industry challenges, market drivers, market restraints, competitive matrix comparison of 13 markets in Asia Pacific for IPTV services based on market dynamics, network economics and content availability.

Dreampark announces its first customer in Ireland as Irish IPTV and ISP provider Magnet Networks has upgraded their existing middleware solution to Dreampark's Dreamgallery, further strengthening the company's position as the leading IPTV middleware provider in Europe.

Magnet Networks has chosen to change their current middleware solution to Dreamgallery after an extensive selection process that tested its speed, flexibility and user-friendliness.

Edgeware announces ioko has recently completed a successful lab trial with the Edgeware Web TV server. This trial was part of ioko's assessment of caching and serving technologies for a range of new web video distribution services.

Edgeware's Web TV Servers cache and deliver up to 32,000 concurrent video streams over the open Internet and can be cost effectively distributed in operator networks or co-location facilities as they require just 1U form factor, max 85W power and virtually no maintenance.

Amino Communications has purchased the MiriATE testing solution from Mirifice, underlining its ongoing commitment to providing outstanding set-top box performance and reliability.

The MiriATE product will be integrated into Amino’s existing facilities to provide accurate and repeatable results from sophisticated automated tests.

EchoStar announces the company's IP-Prime Conversion Program, designed to provide continued delivery of video transport services for telco IP headend facilities across the United States. Commercial transport provider IP-Prime has previously announced it will discontinue its video transport service to headend facilities by July 31, 2009. EchoStar's IP-Prime Conversion Program provides qualified customers with EchoStar's ViP-TV transport service, replacement IDC satellite receivers and a standard professional installation, including compatible LNBs, a satellite dish re-point, cabling and connectors.

Chunghwa Telecom has deployed a broad range of Harmonic’s content management solutions in support of its Multimedia-on-Demand IPTV service expansion. The upgrade has enabled Chunghwa Telecom to offer its IPTV customers a number of advanced interactive services, including multi-channel digital mosaics and time-shifted access to major events and programming, such as the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. The enhanced IPTV offering has been very well received; Chunghwa Telecom serves over 4.3 million broadband subscribers throughout Taiwan.

Zodiac and ADB have integrated the PowerUp TV with ADB's products. The combined solution lets operators more rapidly deploy tru2way and EBIF applications, offering advanced Interactive Television 2.0 services, such as advanced guides, targeted advertising, and TV widgets.

PowerUp is Zodiac's tru2way framework, a common platform of open APIs and libraries that allow for a broad range of applications to be developed and work together across multiple devices.

Comtrend has selected Celeno’s HD Wi-Fi chipset for its new Wireless Video Adaptors. Available now for service providers worldwide, Comtrend’s Wireless Video Adaptors are used to distribute multiple HD IPTV content from any Ethernet-equipped home gateway or DVR to IP set top boxes.

AT&T announces several additions to the AT&T U-verse TV channel lineup, including new international programming for Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese and Korean viewers.

"We continue to make our U-verse TV channel lineup bigger and better so U-verse TV customers can watch the content they enjoy -- in the language they want," said Dan York, executive vice president of content and programming, AT&T Converged Services. "These new international channels help us with important strategic content initiatives and give us the opportunity to deliver even more programming to our diverse customer base."

Broadcom announced the expansion of its IP STB family with a range of highly integrated, system-on-a-chip solutions. These new offerings will enable manufacturers to rapidly design and deploy next generation performance- and feature-optimized hybrid cable, terrestrial and DSL IP STB products for the connected digital home. These new products, which offer a streamlined feature set targeting single, multi-format HD decode, including support for China's audio/video standard, will be demonstrated at this week's China Content Broadcasting Network Conference in Booth #3501.