Tvblob Announces The Integration Of Keisense's Connectivi With The Blobbox For A True Interactive Tv Experience

(09 set 2009) - TVBLOB announces the integration of Keisense’s ConnecTiVi as its preferred text input solution for the BLOBbox, an over-the-top (OTT) hybrid set-top box for SD and HDTV that blends traditional TV with the Internet. Using a BLOBbox and ConnecTiVi, users can bypass tedious menu-driven content searches for TV guide and onDemand programming. Plus, ConnecTiVi drastically improves user interaction on TV by simplifying keyword searches and text entry, making social networking, messaging, shopping and any other imaginable service more user friendly on the TV screen.
ConnecTiVi maps the input of a TV remote control to an onscreen virtual keyboard letting users input text without taking their eyes off the TV content. Keisense then adds error tolerance, prediction, linguistics and personalization to the presented word choices. By letting the user select the desired region or zone of the keyboard - instead of having to specifically click on each individual letter – Keisense provides simple and rapid text entry. In addition, ConnecTiVi’s smart keyboard is deeply integrated with content and applications. In the case of program search, it indexes the metadata of the currently running application and calls on this database as the primary dictionary. The result is a highly efficient, application-specific search.
“The Keisense-TVBLOB solution gives application developers the ability to deploy text-intensive applications on TV”, says Greg Sigel, Vice President of Keisense. “Users can now manage their content and engage socially - right on their televisions.”
“Adding Keisense to our platform significantly expands the interactive possibilities for the BLOBbox TV ecosystem by making it easier for end users to accomplish tasks using just a remote control,” says TVBLOB CEO Fabrizio Caffarelli. “We are changing TV from a one-way broadcast device to a platform of monetizable applications that any Operator and/or Content Provider can leverage. The Keisense integration helps us further empower third-party developers to create unprecedented TV services that excite and engage end users.”
BLOBbox, besides being an over-the-top (OTT) HD PVR free Digital Terrestrial TV set-top box, is TV-centric platform that allows anyone to create Web-based applications and display them directly on TV, be they for personal and/or commercial use. A free SDK is available at the BLOBforge, http://www.blobforge.com and the BLOBbox is available for purchase at http://www.tvblobbox.com.