SYSMEDIA JOIN PHILIPS COMPANIONTV PROGRAM

PHILIPS Digital Networks, one of the leading providers of advanced digital broadcast solutions, and SysMedia have announced that SysMedia have become the first members of the Philips' CompanionTV partnership program.
Membership of the CompanionTV program means that SysMedia may employ Philips' Multimedia Home Platform MHP technology to develop end-to-end digital teletext and magazine services. MHP is the emerging open standard, developed by the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) consortium, that allows any providers of digital content to broadcast interactive digital TV services on all MHP-compliant hardware. The partnership between Philips and SysMedia took effect from August 2001.
The key benefit of Philips' CompanionTV partnership program is to enable application developers like SysMedia to further develop applications for MHP platforms and offer these to potential customers. Philips and their application developer partners will work closely together to ensure continuous compliance with the latest versions of Philips' MHP software and middleware, and to tune mutual marketing initiatives as well as roadmaps for MHP solutions.
SysMedia, with headquarters in the United Kingdom, specialises in providing software solutions for the creation and management of digital teletext services. The agreement with Philips is to develop an end-to-end digital teletext system for implementation by service operators and broadcasters who will then be able to offer more added value services to consumers and therefore increase revenue.
Frank Bosveld, General Manager of the SoftWorks Group at Philips Digital Networks, said: "We have specially developed the CompanionTV partnership program for just such a company as SysMedia. We are delighted to welcome them into the program as the first member and look forward to working together to jointly fulfil the needs of our customers for DVB-MHP applications and solutions. In this way, we will be instrumental in accelerating the take-up of the DVB-MHP in the market place." (CD)