|
Home > Press > Press Releases > Spiderdance and Nearlife Give Life to interactive TV Characters
Spiderdance and Nearlife Give Life to interactive TV Characters
Venice, CA – August 23, 2001 – Spiderdance®, Inc., the industry leader in interactive TV programming, teams with Nearlife® Inc., award-winning developers of interactive entertainment, to create animated interactive TV experiences driven by their combined technologies.
"Imagine participating in an iTV experience in which you can create a 3D character, interact with it in sync with a television show, and then actually see your character appear in the TV broadcast," said Tracy Fullerton President of Spiderdance. We're looking to develop iTV experiences that are full of imagination and inspiration, and Nearlife's combination of great technology and creative talent will help us achieve that goal."
This alliance unites Spiderdance's proven system for developing interactive TV synchronized to broadcast, with Nealife's proven system for creating interactive characters in a broadcast-quality environment. The combined teams will explore the future of iTV and develop animated interactive television programming. The goal is to design innovative, character-driven experiences that fully integrate Nearlife's next-generation Living MediaTM programming with Spiderdance's TruSyncTM Technology.
"Together we will provide television studios and networks with an innovative, well-tested, and low-cost way to add creative audience participation to their programming," said Tinsley Galyean, Nearlife founder and C.E.O. "With characters they can create and manipulate, viewers become immersed in the TV show as never before, increasing audience retention and loyalty. We think this is the future of interactive TV, and Spiderdance and Nearlife have the technology to deliver it today."
A unique opportunity exists for creating animated and live action TV properties with interactive characters that allow viewers to participate in real time with the broadcast and to see their characters appear in the show. This ability is the next step in the evolution of interactive programming.
About Nearlife, Inc.
Nearlife, a spin-off of the MIT Media Lab, is an entertainment technology company creating "Living Media" experiences. Living Media characters and environments travel, migrate, adapt, grow, change, and react based on user input. Nearlife experiences blend real and virtual worlds across a variety of media platforms including museum exhibits, interactive television, the Internet, wireless devices and electronic toys. Widely recognized for its award-winning interactive projects at noted museums, science centers, and other locations around the world, Nearlife is using Web-based elements to expand television programming and location-based exhibits into homes, schools, and beyond. Recent Nearlife clients have included Museum of Science in Boston, Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago, Chicago Children's Museum, Mitsubishi, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and more. Motorola, Inc. is an equity investor in Nearlife.
Additional information about Nearlife, Inc. is available at http://www.nearlife.com. Living Media and the Nearlife logo are registered trademarks of Nearlife, Inc.
About Spiderdance, Inc.
Spiderdance is the leading provider of infrastructure and technology to broadcast and cable networks for creating, running and managing interactive TV programming. Spiderdance has developed TruSyncTM, the most advanced system for deploying interactive TV programming and advertising simultaneously across PCs, set-top boxes and wireless devices. Spiderdance's customers include NBC, AOL Time Warner's The WB and TBS Superstation, Viacom's MTV, A&E's The History Channel and Sony's Game Show Network. Using its patent-pending TruSync” technology, Spiderdance delivers frame-accurate interactive TV advertising, T-commerce, sports, news, polling, game shows and live events. Macromedia, Inc. and Sierra Ventures http://www.spiderdance.com.
For Information Contact:
|
