Oceanic Shops, Plays Games With ActiveVideo
Time Warner Cable's Hawaii Division Offers Games, HSN Shop-by-Remote Through Service
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 10/7/2008 8:01:00 PM
Oceanic Time Warner Cable is using ActiveVideo Networks’ interactive TV service and software to deliver games, home shopping and video mosaics to its Aloha State subscribers.
Initial channels offered by the Hawaii division include interactive games from TAG Networks, shop-by-remote from HSN; and video mosaics for navigating live news, sports and children’s programming.
The TAG games channel provides more than 20 games, including Tetris, Sudoku and a kids’ game featuring Barney. The service is free through March 31, with a 25-cents daily price tag after that. 
HSN’s shopping service lets viewers who have an existing account with the network select on items for purchase as they’re presented on air. Dish Network and Cablevision Systems also offer HSN’s “Shop by Remote” service.
As deployed by Oceanic, the ActiveVideo service delivers interactive channels as video-on-demand streams over existing QAMs.
“The strength of our capability from a technology standpoint is, we work with any set-top box, and any content type,” said ActiveVideo president and CEO Jeff Miller.
Oceanic tested ActiveVideo during the 2008 Olympics Games in August with a system-wide trial. That application let subscribers watch a single-screen mosaic coverage of multiple channels of broadcast and cable Olympics programming, as well as access news, photo albums, schedules and other content obtained from the Web.
ActiveVideo, formerly known as ICTV, provides interactive TV service to operators representing 1.4 million subscribers. Its distribution partners include Time Warner Cable, Grande Communications and Hong Kong’s PCCW.
