As evidenced by last month’s launch of GoogleTV, the battle to make the boob tube more interactive and personalized is heating up. French quad-play operator Bouygues Telecom has fired a shot across the bow now, with a Flash-enabled interface for its Bbox IPTV service.
Launched earlier this month, it gives consumers a visually rich and intuitive portal and entertainment programming guide, for now. But future releases will include a Media Center for managing user-generated content, and, crucially, a Widget Framework for accessing news, sports, weather, traffic, entertainment gossip, stocks and horoscopes, using the TV.
“The newest release of our Bbox IPTV interface makes it easier than ever before for our customers to access rich content and personalize their IPTV viewing experience,” said Yann Loussouarn, services marketing director for Bouygues Telecom.
The interface is powered by Bluestreak Technology Inc.’s MachBlue platform to power the new interface.
Bouygues Telecom will deploy the complete Bbox TV interface in three stages:
- Home Portal and EPG – Now available, the new Bbox TV home portal offers a more intuitive and fluid portal than previous Bbox versions, with greater customization options available for the consumer. It is accompanied by an interactive entertainment programming guide (EPG) which allows consumers to search for programs by scrolling through a mosaic of tiles that display each channel’s programming.
- Widget Framework – Deploying at the end of summer, the upcoming widget framework will offer consumers the ability to access seven widgets that deliver popular Internet content to the consumer directly on their television. This content will include information such as news headlines, sports scores, weather forecasts, traffic reports, entertainment gossip, stocks, and horoscopes. More widgets will be added in the future, as Bouygues Telecom taps into the over two million Adobe Flash developers in the market today to make new widgets rapidly available to consumers in the future.
- Media Center – Deploying in the fall, the new Media Center function will allow consumers to view their favorite photos, videos and music using their Bbox TV. Consumers will be able to insert a USB or external hard drive to upload their multimedia content.
Bluestreak MachBlue platform allows the solution to be deployed for all customers through software upgrades. MachBlue also enables access to the developer community.
“With the launch of this new, Flash-powered IPTV interface, Bouygues Telecom is setting themselves apart in the IPTV market,” said Dominique Jodoin, Bluestreak’s CEO and president. “The slick user experience and rich widget content coupled with Bouygues direct marketing will prove successful.”
In 2010 Bouygues Telecom launched Video 24/24, a quadruple-play offer including the first totally unlimited mobile call-plan. This year, the operator will also introduce a very high-speed offer.
Bouygues Telecom's mobile network covers over 98 percent of the population. Its 3G+ network provides mobile Internet access for 81 percent of the population.
