SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- OpenTV Corp. , a leading provider of enabling technologies for advanced digital television services, today announced that over 1,500 interactive television advertising campaigns using the company's technologies have now been launched by digital television network operators in Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia. OpenTV's advanced technologies enable advertisers to offer a more engaging brand experience, often taking viewers from a traditional 30-second experience to one that can last more than five minutes. These interactive ads ("iAds") enable viewers to engage with advertisers, allowing them to request further information about the advertiser's products or services, or to view additional information about a specific product.

In Europe, advertisers have been using OpenTV's middleware technologies to produce iAds since 1999. Unique campaigns have been run since then, primarily on BSkyB in the United Kingdom, as well as other network operators across Europe. Some of the world's largest advertisers have now used iAds, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Domino's Pizza, Nissan, Renault, Honda, British Telecom, Lloyds, Rimmel, L'Oreal, Barclaycard, Sony, Compaq, Panasonic, Hasbro, Procter & Gamble among many others.

Since January 2005, FOXTEL, Australia's leading pay-TV operator, has run iAds from such leading companies as Toyota, Mercedes, The Commonwealth Bank, Sony and Fisher, and Paykel.

And in April 2006, EchoStar's DISH Network(TM), which serves more than 12 million U.S. households, completed the launch of OpenTV's interactive advertising system. Using OpenTV's technology, EchoStar has produced successful iAd campaigns throughout the past year, with leading brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Sony Pictures, and Hewlett-Packard. OpenTV's advanced advertising solutions include set-top box software that enables iAds, authoring tools and services that reduce the time and effort required to create iAds, content management tools that optimize bandwidth utilization, and trigger insertion tools.

"Advertisers are under increased pressure to achieve deeper engagement and better accountability in their advertising spend," said James A. (Jim) Chiddix, CEO of OpenTV. "Technologies that allow viewers to bypass traditional ads have created a sense of urgency for advertisers to embrace new advertising options. Our advanced advertising solutions allow advertisers to deliver tailored, more meaningful messages to consumers with measurable results. And melding those technologies with a robust back-end infrastructure that is critical to planning, scheduling and billing those advertisements is an area in which we have successfully achieved a dominant market position over the past year. This is the future of TV advertising, and OpenTV expects to lead the way."

OpenTV's iAd experiences include: -- Interactive sites that may be launched from a 30-second spot -- Product description pages -- Image galleries -- Links to long form video (on another channel, a VOD server, or on a PVR hard drive) -- Requests for Information ("RFI"), including brochures, samples and sales contact, -- Capabilities for locating local retailers -- Advertising oriented games -- Sweepstakes capabilities

OpenTV offers end-to-end advanced advertising solutions, including technologies that: engage television audiences by enabling the creation, validation and launch of interactive and enhanced advertising applications; target specific audience segments, down to the household level, with messages more relevant to them; allow network operators and advertisers to measure and analyze the efficacy of those advanced advertising forms. Additionally, OpenTV's advertising sales and inventory management solutions offer customers flexibility for dynamic allocation, scheduling, trafficking, verification, billing and reporting of traditional and advanced advertising. And OpenTV supports all of that, and its customers, with the most extensive intellectual property in the sector.

About Open TV

OpenTV is one of the world's leading providers of technologies and services enabling the delivery of digital and interactive television. The company's software has been integrated in over 70 million digital set-top-boxes in 96 countries. The software enables enhanced television, interactive shopping, interactive and addressable advertising, games and gaming, personal video recording, and a variety of consumer care and communication applications. For more information, please visit http://www.opentv.com/ .

CONTACT: Barbara Cassidy of OpenTV, +1-415-962-5000, or
bcassidy@opentv.com; or Ray Yeung, yeung@braincomm.com, or Matt Hantz,
hantz@braincomm.com, both of Brainerd Communicators, +1-212-986-6667, for
OpenTV

Web site: http://www.opentv.com/