SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Minerva Networks today announced significant extensions to its open, standards based application development suite to complement its IPTV services management software platform. Included are a number of new APIs and tools to fully customize and enable next generation IPTV applications, such as personalized recommendations, advertising, and e-commerce. Interactive applications can be built using standard web tools and then seamlessly integrated via an XML interface with Minerva's iTVmanager software.

Minerva's development tools give content providers the ability to interact with the viewer in realtime. Unlike traditional interactive TVarchitecturesthat require expensive pre-encoding of the video, the Minerva solution can use any VOD or Live TV content, including user submitted videos. While the program or movie is being viewed, the Minerva software on the set-top box connects with the interactive application server. Using standard XML, the application server specifies and controls the position of text, graphicsand navigation buttons on the TV. Even video playback and trick play functions can be directly controlled (or disabled) by the application. The highly flexible system can be used to enable telescopic advertising, distant learning, polling/voting, fantasy sports, basic games, shopping applications and can also tie into cross platform applications on the PC or mobile phones.

itaas, the premier provider of advanced TV application services, has ported their cross platform MPTV client application to the Minerva Networks' IPTV framework. The MPTV application allows viewers watching video channels to purchase anyassociated content such as video clips, ringtones, and wallpaper and download them to their mobile devices

"Using Minerva's APIs and development tools, we were able to port our application very quickly without dealing with the complexity of writing and integrating set-top box specific code. With a single port, our application can run on any set-top box supported by iTVManager. Minerva's IPTV softwareplatform will help us build the next generation of applications that fundamentally change the way advertisers, media companies and service providers engage andinteract with the viewer," said Jaspal Bhasin, COO of itaas.

Minerva Networks Inc.