IWEDIA to complement its added-value offer with software components

RENNES, France — IWEDIA Middleware, the international provider of embedded software solutions for digital television devices, today announced it will be complementing its current product portfolio of turnkey software solutions with a range of standalone software components.

To date, IWEDIA has released a range of editions of its Comedia middleware, providing master software for digital-ready TV sets and set-top boxes. These turnkey software solutions have been successfully deployed in the field within various SD and HD device configurations, ranging from simple zappers and digital media players (over USB) right through to Personal Video Recorders (using either an external or internal hard disk drive).

This turnkey approach has proved to be particularly suitable for Customers who consider that software is not part of their core business and thus choose not to invest in software R&D.

Meanwhile, other Customers have invested significantly in the development of their own software framework and wish to leverage this. When the time comes to make upgrades, they go through a traditional ‘make or buy’ process which may lead to them deciding to enhance it by means of third-party software.

To better serve this category of Customer, IWEDIA has isolated some key software components from its existing turnkey solutions in order to offer them as standalone products.

All these components share the same characteristics: ‘one component, one function’; designed to be integrated within master software; configurable; portable (hardware-agnostic); testable and field-proven.

The following components are being proposed either immediately or in the coming months: CI host software, CI Plus host software, MHEG-5 CI+ browser, MHEG-5 engine (UK profile), Personal Video Recorder engine, DLNA/UPnP protocol stack, DSM-CC protocol stack, software upgrade engine, DVB subtitle decoder, Teletext decoder, and Web browsing components.

Patrick Desproges, CEO, IWEDIA, says: “This component-based approach is another way for IWEDIA to provide added-value software solutions. It smoothly complements the offer of turnkey solutions and allows us to better fulfill the requirements of those of our Customers who have invested in proprietary software frameworks, especially A-brand TV manufacturers.”