Strategy & Technology (S&T) has announced its partnership with FourthWall Media to integrate key features of each company’s EBIF tools.
These bundled offerings will include the FourthWall User Agent into S&T’s TSMonitor product, S&T’s TSBinder integrated with FourthWall’s Ad Widgets, and the S&T Carousel Streamer with FourthWall’s TV Widgets.
The partnership enables both S&T and FourthWall the ability to deliver a complete, end-to-end offering of complimentary products for interactive television applications.
EBIF stands for Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format and is a multimedia content format defined by a specification developed under the OpenCable project of CableLabs USA.
S&T’s TSMonitor, developed in collaboration with FourthWall, is the first scalable ETV application monitoring tool, integrated with FourthWall’s EBIF User Agent and application development environment. FourthWall’s EBIF platform has become the industry standard for ETV deployments on thin client set-top boxes, offering the first
EBIF User Agent developed to run on legacy Cisco/Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes as well as Motorola and tru2way environments.
S&T’s TSBinder software is used to generate early-bound EBIF ads, binding the advert to the digital video content with which it is associated, allowing FourthWall’s Ad Widgets to deliver a growing suite of addressable interactive advertising applications and data. These include billboards, voting and polling, request for information, click-to-call, VOD telescoping, microsites, MSO Cross-Sell/Up-Sell, and t-commerce.
S&T’s Carousel Streamer, like its big brother TSBroadcaster, generates EBIF data carousels and encodes them into MPEG-2 transport streams, and delivers them in-band to provide unbound EBIF applications available across all services on the platform. The Carousel Streamer is the application delivery technology integrated with FourthWall’s TV Widgets.
“S&T is pleased to be partnering with FourthWall to deliver a richer interactive TV offering to our customers. S&T and FourthWall’s products are naturally complimentary and this partnership will provide a set of enhanced tools and services for robust EBIF application delivery and monitoring,” said Adrian Fowkes, CTO Americas at S&T, in a statement.
“FourthWall Media is equally pleased to partner with S&T,” said Mike Israel, FourthWall COO. “Our products dovetail perfectly with theirs and offer the cable operator the companion tools they will need to take advantage of the growing and soon to be ubiquitous EBIF platform. We look forward to our new partnership that will work so effectively for all parties in the iTV ecosystem.”
