In a move to make creating dynamic content for interactive television
more feasible for developers, Liberate
Technologies
will integrate Macromedia’s Web authoring solutions, Dreamweaver and Flash, into its interactive TV
software platform.
Using Dreamweaver and Flash, developers will be able to create dynamic
content that will enable TV-Web integration, with interactions such as
“TV-like” interactive interfaces, rich-media advertisements, and online
games.
Announced as part of Liberate’s (LBRT) PopTV Program developer center, the
integration of these products will enable developers to provide content for
the convergence of television with the Web. Liberate will create extensions
to Dreamweaver to enable developers to produce content for display on
broadcast video televisions. It will also seamlessly integrate Flash Player
technology into all of its products for the cable, telco and ISP
markets.
According to an October survey conducted by NPD Research, the parent
company of MediaMetrix, 88.3 percent of Web users can view Flash content without
having to download and install a player. Flash technology enables
high-impact, vector-based Web sites that deliver motion,
sound, interactivity, and graphics.
Integration of Flash content in a television-based media will enable
developers to produce content with the same production value and effects
that consumers are accustomed to seeing on TV, with the immediate playback
option of many Web sites that already incorporate Flash.
According to a statement issued by Macromedia (MACR), Flash is a natural fit for
interactive set-top boxes: Its graphics are compact and fast-loading, but are also resolution independent so
they can scale with no quality loss to any size TV.
Liberate, formerly known as Network Computer Inc., is an emerging player in the set-top box space.
It competes against such companies as WebTV and OpenTV, and its customers and partners include America
Online, Cable and Wireless, Cannon, Cox Communications, Comcast, Cisco
Systems, RealNetworks, Sun Microsystems and U.S. West.
