Device Arena

At The Cable Show in Washington, D.C. today, Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) took the next step in enriching and personalizing the cable TV experience by announcing that its popular Interactive Media Manager (IMM) now supports the two main standards-based platforms in the cable industry, EBIF and tru2way™ technologies.

With IMM, cable operators, content providers and media agencies can now quickly create new interactive TV applications such as enhanced TV (voting, competitions and polls) or interactive advertisement to augment the broadcast experience and to offer the TV viewer a real interactive and personal TV experience. This allows users to engage with the content and brand of their choice via interactivity enabled by the IMM.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs is developing a wide range of enhanced interactive applications that provide mobile, call back and other digital media redemption capabilities to the brands and advertisers. This combined with the power of IMM will ensure the increased success of EBIF and Tru2way in this growing industry.

“This is an excellent opportunity for Alcatel-Lucent to provide its wealth of knowledge and experience in building and delivering interactive solutions to the cable industry,” said Mark Janes, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Digital Media and Advertising activities. “Cable operators, content producers and agencies using Alcatel-Lucent’s IMM solution will be able to quickly adapt to their viewer’s fast changing needs thanks to the huge flexibility and scalability of our solution’s design, build and template-based architecture.”

“What makes the IMM unique is its open standards approach, complementing and working with existing parts of the value chain to deliver interactivity. Its easy to use, intuitive, web-based tools are ideal for editors, producers, and agencies to design, create, publish and manage interactive TV services as often as they desire”, Mark Janes added.

By providing a design/authoring environment together with a comprehensive set of templates and functionality, the IMM enables the creation and management of unlimited interactive applications for multiple platforms and devices. This makes it possible to write an application once that can be deployed many times, giving the content providers and media agencies a simplified creation and management environment so that they can focus on their core expertise and do not have to worry about the technical capabilities of the actual interactive digital TV platform.

Alcatel-Lucent