Hewlett-Packard Co took the opportunity to announce progress on its deals with Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd and Deutsche Telekom AG to develop interactive television services in Hong Kong and Germany based on the HP MediaStream Server. Following a 22-month trial, Hong Kong Telecom plans to deploy fully interactive-television services for its subscribers, through newly-launched subsidiary Hongkong Telecom IMS Ltd, in the middle of next year. Potential services include video-on-demand, cross-merchandising, home shopping, home banking and network games. Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom plans to use Hewlett-Packard technology in its multi-year interactive television trial in Berlin, Hamburg, the Cologne and Bonn region, Leipzig, Nrnberg and Stuttgart. Hewlett-Packard’s MediaStream Server will be used in the Stuttgart, Germany trial, the largest of the six. This trial will provide video-on-demand services initially to 2,500 subscribers during the next two years, and eventually to 4,000. Future services are expected to include home shopping and education. In a related announcement, Hewlett-Packard said that MTV Europe has chosen the HP Broadcast Video Server as the strategic digital broadcast technology for five new MTV channels that it is launching in the Middle East in February. The company has bought three Broadcast Video Servers to automate all advertising spot insertions for the five new Music TeleVision-operated channels; the servers form part of a strategic broadcast technology system designed to enable MTV Europe to expand its storage capacity and increase the number of channels it can provide in future. The digital video servers will be running next-generation broadcast automation software from London-based Abit Ltd.
