Zodiac Demos ITV Movie Guide

VALLEY STREAM, N.Y. -- Zodiac Interactive, an Emmy award-winning developer of software for interactive television, announced today plans to demonstrate its new Interactive Television 2.0™ Movie Guide at NCTA's The Cable Show '09, being held in Washington, D.C. this week. The iTV Movie Guide will be demonstrated at the CableNET® Pavilion, which is co-sponsored by CableLabs® at the show, Zodiac's executive suite ES-11, Macrovision (booth #1605) and Advanced Digital Broadcast (booth #525).

Another Zodiac tru2way technology, the Zodiac iTV Movie Guide demonstrates the use of movie data feeds from Macrovision Data Solutions to display detailed movie information that cross references movies, cast members, genre, and much more. The guide offers intuitive navigation through movie descriptions, cast and credits, actor information, and it will even show the user a list of similar movies. With ease-of-use in mind, ultimately everything ties back to the “Main Movie” screen, and the ‘exit’ button always returns the user to a full screen television viewing experience and closes the application.

Macrovision entertainment metadata is widely licensed throughout the industry and is a standard for identifying media products. By demonstrating Zodiac's iTV Movie Guide at The Cable Show, Macrovision and Advanced Digital Broadcast, who will be displaying the guide on their tru2way set-top, are illustrating the power of tru2way, including advanced guides.

"Our Data Solutions deliver in-depth relational databases of descriptive entertainment metadata and editorial content covering movies, television, music, and games,” said Corey Ferengul, EVP of Product Management and Marketing at Macrovision. “The demonstration of our Data Solutions on Zodiac’s iTV Movie Guide highlights the ease and simplicity of integrating our metadata technologies on tru2way platforms and devices. The result is a compelling movie discovery experience for consumers, enabling them to connect with and enjoy even more content while reaping the benefits of tru2way interactive applications.”

Zodiac's Movie Guide runs on top of the company's PowerUp™ framework software for tru2way. PowerUp is Zodiac’s tru2way framework, a common platform of open APIs and libraries that allow for a broad range of applications to be developed and work together across multiple tru2way components, including authoring tools, stacks/middleware, set-tops, etc.

The PowerUp framework gives operators easy access to plug-and-play advanced Interactive Television 2.0™ services, such as advanced guides, EBIF applications, and TV widgets including local restaurant searching, click-to-call, games, photo-sharing, weather, traffic, sports scores, local news, and more.

“We're excited to be launching our Interactive Television 2.0 Movie Guide at The Cable Show this year," said Alexander Libkind, Zodiac’s Chief Operating Officer. “PowerUp is the middleware software, if you will, that ensures all tru2way applications look and act the same, regardless of the tru2way components the operators choose. And now with our Movie Guide, we can demonstrate with our valuable technology solution providers, Macrovision and ADB, the capabilities and iTV advanced services that our framework can provide, including advanced Movie Guides."

Zodiac Interactive