NCube, WorldGate Offer Interactive Advertising

nCUBE Corporation, a supplier of interactive multimedia servers, and WorldGate Communications Inc., a service and technology company, Friday launched a joint effort to enhance interactive advertising.

The service will utilize WorldGate's Internet on EVERY TV Service, which enables cable subscribers to access the Internet, e-mail and other interactive services through their television and existing cable connection.

Advertising content enabled for WorldGate's patented channel hyperlinking can be transparently encoded, stored, distributed, played back and verified using nCUBE's ad insertion product line.

nCUBE's industry ad insertion gear supports over 60 MPEG, 6 Mbps streams from the same server and same ad for both analog and digital cable networks.

The partnership offers the most efficient and scalable advertising insertion solution in the world, said Michael J. Pohl, nCUBE president.

"For several years, we have been exploring ways to bring more revenue into the cable operators hands and partnering with WorldGate does just that," he said.

"Interactive advertising delivers the television viewer the utmost consumer experience, without all the clutter of traditional advertising. Zeroing in on their needs provides advertisers with the ultimate in targeted advertising. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved."

Specific offerings include: enriched television through Channel HyperLinking, 24 x 7 availability on every channel, enhanced TV experience from Web content that is related to TV programs, access to information about products advertised on TV, interactive content designed for the TV audience, picture-in-picture capability on digital set-top boxes and secure e-commerce transactions via SSL compliance.