Alcatel-Lucent Accelerates the Deployment of Interactive TV and Advertising Services for Cable TV

WASHINGTON, D.C. - At The Cable Show today, Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) took the next step in enriching and personalizing the cable TV experience by announcing that its popular Interactive Media Manager (IMM) now supports the two main standards-based platforms in the cable industry, EBIF and tru2way(TM) technologies.

With IMM, cable operators, content providers and media agencies can now quickly create new interactive TV applications such as enhanced TV (voting, competitions and polls) or interactive advertisement to augment the broadcast experience and to offer the TV viewer a real interactive and personal TV experience. This allows users to engage with the content and brand of their choice via interactivity enabled by the IMM.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs is developing a wide range of enhanced interactive applications that provide mobile, call back and other digital media redemption capabilities to the brands and advertisers. This combined with the power of IMM will ensure the increased success of EBIF and Tru2way in this growing industry.

“This is an excellent opportunity for Alcatel-Lucent to provide its wealth of knowledge and experience in building and delivering interactive solutions to the cable industry,” said Mark Janes, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Digital Media and Advertising activities. “Cable operators, content producers and agencies using Alcatel-Lucent’s IMM solution will be able to quickly adapt to their viewer’s fast changing needs thanks to the huge flexibility and scalability of our solution’s design, build and template-based architecture.”

“What makes the IMM unique is its open standards approach, complementing and working with existing parts of the value chain to deliver interactivity. Its easy to use, intuitive, web-based tools are ideal for editors, producers, and agencies to design, create, publish and manage interactive TV services as often as they desire”, Mark Janes added.

By providing a design/authoring environment together with a comprehensive set of templates and functionality, the IMM enables the creation and management of unlimited interactive applications for multiple platforms and devices. This makes it possible to write an application once that can be deployed many times, giving the content providers and media agencies a simplified creation and management environment so that they can focus on their core expertise and do not have to worry about the technical capabilities of the actual interactive digital TV platform.

About EBIF and Tru2way

EBIF is designed to work with legacy set-top boxes reaching millions of homes with existing digital cable TV services. Tru2way is a technology that is a full OpenCable environment and is the next evolution of cable TV with even more advanced interactive TV services. Cable operators that have announced support for the tru2way platform represent about 80% of all US cable subscribers.

About the Alcatel-Lucent 5930 Interactive Media Manager

The Alcatel-Lucent 5930 Interactive Media Manager enables subscribers to interact with the brands they care about in compelling new ways across multiple platforms, including mobile, PC, IPTV, as well as digital satellite, cable and terrestrial. Employing a complete design, build and publishing tool set together with pre-tested, intuitive, web-based templates, it enables content providers to easily and affordably design, create and manage interactive TV applications such as voting, enhanced TV and interactive advertising to reach consumers in new ways while also providing subscribers with a more personalized TV experience.

The IMM delivers a broad set of tools that gives full control of application design, service creation and on-going management to interactive services. The IMM strategy is to accelerate the deployment cycle while reducing the internal development costs. Additionally, the IMM is designed to support the television operator’s delivery of comprehensive service offerings with its multi-platform publishing capabilities delivering content to the many devices their subscriber may have. This is done via a centralized hub that delivers the same capabilities to TV, Internet and Mobile subscribers.

For more information please visit: www1.alcatel-lucent.com/products/productsummary.jsp?productNumber=tcm%3A228-1368951635

About Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, providing solutions that to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 16.98 billion in 2008 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: www.alcatel-lucent.com

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

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