OEDN announces Academic ITV Software Developer Kit for Universities

Business Wire, March 10, 2009

Unique partnership brings Ensequence, Comcast Media Center & Ball State University together to give college students access to ITV app development through software tools and remote testing program.

NEW YORK -- OEDN (The OCAP/EBIF Developer Network) announced today the formation of an Academic ITV Software Developer Kit (AISDK) program, with Ball State University as its first participating school.

For the 2009-2010 school year, students at Ball State will have access to OEDN’s Academic ITV Software Developer Kit as part of their curriculum. Comprised of a framework for EBIF & Tru2Way (OCAP) application development & testing against industry standard tools, the AISDK is designed to give select US universities the ability to build applications locally – while testing them remotely – an end-to-end process that allows a student-built ITV applications to be built and tested in real-world conditions.

OEDN has been working in collaboration with several key ITV companies & partners to make the AISDK available to schools. Those partners currently consist of Ensequence, and the Comcast Media Center (CMC) HITS AxIS program.

“The HITS AxIS program at CMC is looking forward to partnering with OEDN to allow students at Ball State to test interactive television apps against real-world digital cable environments,” said Gary Traver, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Comcast Media Center. “With OEDN's orchestration of all the necessary components in the AISDK, a US university student will have the opportunity to take an app from conception to development to test & playout on an actual cable set-top box – without the need for an expensive digital cable headend – for the very first time.”

“Ensequence has long supported university involvement in interactive television, going back to our early ITV days in the United Kingdom,” said Aslam Khader, Chief Product Officer for Ensequence. “We are pleased to contribute the Ensequence Create™ authoring product to the OEDN AISDK for Ball State. By putting our products in the hands of students, we are helping to provide access for up-and-coming interactive television developers.”

“Ball State and the Center for Media Design (CMD) are excited to participate in the OEDN community,” said Mike Bloxham, Director, Insight & Research for the CMD. “We look forward to applying our strengths in research, usability and the talent of our students by integrating this project into emerging curriculum that will lead toward new career paths.”

Dave Ferguson, Ball State’s associate Vice President of Emerging Media Initiatives and CMD Executive Director, added that “This commitment to advance the knowledge base in interactive television fits perfectly into Ball State’s recently launched $17.7 million emerging media initiative.”

OEDN will serve the role of coordinating all parties involved, and providing student developer support through the OEDN.net website.

“In orchestrating all the parties at the table, OEDN seeks to kick-start ITV app development for digital cable in U.S. universities,” said Will Kreth, Sr. Director of Advanced Video Strategy for Time Warner Cable and founder of OEDN. “The time has come to share with a new generation of developers what EBIF & Tru2Way (OCAP) can do – with an eye toward how these applications will interact on 3 screens in the future. Our role as an intermediary is to get students excited about the potential of digital cable, show them the paths to development, testing and deployment – and connect them with the resources necessary to build a career path. That has been our charter and remains our focus going forward.”

About OEDN

Founded in 2007 and sponsored by five of the leading cable MSOs, the mission of the OCAP/EBIF Developer Network (OEDN) community is to drive awareness of and application development efforts using the two primary interactive cable television open standards for middleware: OCAP (known to consumers as tru2way) and EBIF. Through its developer network website, oedn.net and via other well-known social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook, OEDN aims to broadly socialize the advantages of developing interactive apps for digital cable, and to bring a new generation of software development talent to the cable industry.

About Comcast Media Center

Denver-based Comcast Media Center (CMC), a business unit of Comcast Cable, provides centralized content management and distribution solutions for cable system operators and members of the content community, including television programming networks, independent producers and advertisers “All From the Center.” CMC’s multiplatform content distribution services includes its HITS Quantum all- digital platform of over 210 linear HDTV and standard definition digital video and audio services; an Advertising Distribution Network (ADN) for centrally managing cross channel promotions and advertising; and a video on demand (VOD) platform that manages and distributes over 7,000 VOD assets each month. The CMC also provides a full spectrum of content production, management and distribution services, including channel origination, transcoding, hosting, storage and IP multicasting, for traditional and new media platforms. More information is available at http://www.comcastmediacenter.com