Shop At Home and OpenTV Create Unparalleled Shopping Experience for US Television Viewers
-- Companies Strike Deal to Develop and Market Interactive Shopping Applications for Television--
NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 3, 2000-- Shop At Home, Inc. (Nasdaq: SATH - news), an electronic commerce leader in both the broadcast and Internet channels, and OpenTV (Nasdaq: OPTV - news; AEX: OPTV), the leading worldwide provider of software that enables digital interactive television, today announced they have entered into an agreement to develop and market interactive television applications. Together, Shop At Home and OpenTV will provide enhanced services to Shop At Home's current and new customers as well as third party content producers in broadcast, satellite and cable platforms.
Under the agreement, OpenTV will develop and customize the software application engines necessary to support this enhanced service. OpenTV will also develop the software necessary for the integration of the application engines with Shop At Home content. Subsequently, Shop At Home will assist in the development of the applications and will provide licensing, content, fulfillment and design elements associated with their television shopping platform.
Shop At Home anticipates a debut of the interactive television technology to certain cable or satellite viewers, as early as the end of the first quarter 2001. Viewers will be able to use their remote control device to order an item, obtain additional information, interact with customer service representatives in real time, or search for content and available products not currently being shown on the network. The alliance with OpenTV is expected to provide consumers a more exciting and innovative means of purchasing products from Shop At Home.
Shop At Home CEO and president, Kent Lillie said of the agreement, ``Our expertise in electronic commerce, coupled with the infrastructure we have in place today to support enhanced commerce applications, uniquely positions us to offer this compelling technology to television shopping customers nationwide. Furthermore, with little to no additional cost, the infrastructure we have built enables us to provide back-end services to any programmer that seeks to develop an interactive i-TV commerce relationship with their viewers.''
``Shopping is an ideal application for television interactivity,'' said James Ackerman, OpenTV's COO and president, and CEO of OpenTV Studios. ``This agreement marks an exciting marriage of compelling content -- Shop At Home's nationally popular consumer products offering -- with OpenTV's technology that is designed to enable TV viewers to shop for thousands of products, from their couch, with just a few clicks of the remote control.''
Mr. Lillie added, ``We are positioning Shop At Home to be a leader not only in our current `on-line' and `on-the-air' businesses, but to become an early and vigorous competitor in the emerging `enhanced' and `contextual' commerce marketplaces of tomorrow as well.''
The interactive television market is expected to generate more than $48.2 billion in revenue by 2005, according to Forrester Research. |
