IWEDIA Middleware surfs on the success of its Comedia middleware Do-It-Yourself edition

RENNES, France — IWEDIA Middleware, the international provider of embedded DVB-based software solutions for digital television devices, today confirmed the success of its Comedia middleware’s Do-It-Yourself edition. The statement was made to coincide with the opening of IFA, which is taking place in Berlin from August 29th through September 3rd.

When marketing its Comedia middleware for TV set and set-top box makers, IWEDIA became aware that the design-in project (which consists in porting, integrating, and validating Comedia within the target device) posed a problem for manufacturers. From the latter’s point of view, the return on investment on the costs of this project was frequently questionable, especially for low-end devices.

To address this issue, IWEDIA designed a new edition of the Comedia product which enables manufacturers to handle the design-in project on their own and to scale the second level of support provided by IWEDIA’s professional services team.

Dubbed Comedia Do-It-Yourself (DIY), the product is delivered with a toolkit which comprises the authoring tool to customise the user interface, the application engine plug-ins (in source code), the porting layer (in source code), and a wide collection of “.ini” files to configure the DVB system layer.

The product has met with huge success on the market: by the middle of 2008, over 2.5 million Comedia units had been deployed within TV sets and set-top boxes.

Patrick Desproges, CEO, IWEDIA, says: “The DIY concept has been instrumental in Comedia’s market success, because we have allowed manufacturers access to state-of-the-art middleware at the same time as enabling them to manage design-in projects smoothly on their own. Furthermore, we are just at the beginning of the success story: we will be replicating this strategy for more sophisticated devices such as HD TV sets and digital TV recorders.”