Esgem on board for Philips MHP partnership

A British company has been invited onto Philips Companion TV Partners group.
Philips is continuing to drive adoption of the Multimedia Home Platfom (MHP) open standard for interactive digital television with the addition of new members to its Companion TV partnership programme – an initiative created to support companies working on MHP solutions.
Among the latest member of the internationally-backed initiative are British digital TV solutions provider Esgem.
Under the scheme, companies will employ Philips' development tools to carry out their respective MHP projects in application areas such as home banking, graphical-based authoring, data capture, automation and visualisation, and portal and communications solutions.
Throughout the course of the Companion TV programme, Philips will work closely together with partners to help them develop fully compliant and interoperable DVB-MHP products and applications. Other partner benefits include opportunities to be take part in MHP technology roadmap discussions, preferential notice on upgrades to Philips MHP middleware, and marketing support such as trade show assistance and marketing communication materials.
Esgem, headquartered in Bristol, specialises in digital TV application solutions and test, debug and monitoring tools for distributed machines. Esgem's agreement with Philips will develop additional MHP-specific data capture, automation and data visualisation components for Esgem's assayer product offering.
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of 32.3 billion euros in 2001. It is a global leader in electrical products and employs 189,000 in more than 60 countries
Esgem Ltd, www.esgem.com
Philips, www.philips.com
(GMcG)