Image Wireless, OpenTV Plan for Deployment of Interactive Television in Canada

OpenTV Inc. (Mountain View, CA) and Image Wireless Communications Inc. (New York) have signed a five-year agreement to deliver interactive television to Saskatchewan, Canada by the end of 1999.

Image Wireless Communications will license OpenTV's operating system technology for its digital MMDS TV network. Additionally, service providers and application developers may license OpenTV's authoring tools, such as the OpenTV Software Developers Kit and OpenAuthor. The agreement represents the first time OpenTV's software technology for digital receivers will be deployed in Canada. Further, it will be the first time OpenTV's solution will be used as part of a Multipoint Multichannel Distribution System (MMDS).

Sagemis supplying the digital MMDS receivers that include NagraVision's conditional access technology. As part of the agreement, OpenTV will provide the head-end solution software, OpenStreamer, to interface with Harmonic's MPEG-2 Multiplexers using standard DVB ASI interface. Image Wireless Communications has already begun field testing the complete system and plans to launch digital pay television services by the end of the summer, with interactive services deployed before year's end.