RA’ANANA, Israel -- Orca Interactive, an innovation leader in IPTV, has signed an agreement with CTV International, a new service provider offering ethnic content to ex-pat communities around the world. The new service offers local language national TV programmes and video content on the viewer’s PC or Set-Top-Box (STB) via the internet. The service will be one of the first live deployments in which an IPTV middleware has "crossed the lines" to support a fully OTT service. Services will initially provide ethnic programmes and content to Israeli communities or travellers located outside of Israel, anywhere in the world.

CTV International has selected Orca Interactive’s RiGHTv middleware platform as the basis for its new service because it allows them to use existing, mature components that provide a full TV-like experience. In addition, RiGHTV's open architecture enables them to select the codecs which offers the maximum flexibility regarding hardware no matter where in the world it is deployed and the option to support both the PC and the STB. This was a key criterion for CTV, as they believe that availability of content is vital, since they expect their service to be a secondary source of content to the consumer or traveller who wants to keep up to date with news, programs and events from their country of origin and in their native language.

The services available over the Orca RiGHTv platform include live TV, network based time-shifted TV (network DVR), Pay-Per-View, Subscription VOD, Transactional VOD and Live Radio. In order to support the specific needs of an OTT service provider, Self Service, Pre and Post payments methods are available on either the STB or a PC based User Interface. CTV cite another important reason for choosing the Orca solution as the ability to customise the User Interface and develop their own applications using Orca’s Software Development Kit. The CTV business model involves providing customised front end interfaces in a variety of languages and with different bouquets of content to different ethnic groups around the world, so the ability to support mobile devices in the future was also essential.

According to Meni Dvir President of CTV, “Orca’s RiGHTv was the natural choice for us given its flexibility of support for different devices and its open standards-based approach, which gives us maximum flexibility to roll out our service on a global basis and cut our initial investment in the total cost of the solution ownership.”

Orca Interactive Ltd.