ADB, First Media team up to launch Indonesia’s 1st HD pay-TV service

10 August 2010 Geneva, Switzerland: Advanced Digital Broadcast (www.adbglobal.com), a leading supplier of technology to the global digital television industry, has announced that Indonesia-based First Media Tbk, will use ADB’s products and solutions to deploy the country’s first high-definition pay-TV service.

The deal marks ADB’s entry into the vast Indonesian market, where pay-TV is gaining popularity. ADB’s devices will enable subscribers to enjoy not only high-definition TV, but also video-on-demand, interactivity, and a wide range of value-added features.

“We’re glad to work with First Media, our first customer in Indonesia, which is a market with high potential” said Maurice Liu, ADB’s Sales VP for the Asia Pacific. “With this collaboration, ADB will become the first provider of high-definition interactive pay-TV devices in Indonesia, and we are looking forward to the high-quality and innovative HD services that First Media will roll out.

All set-top devices delivered to First Media are pre-integrated with CarboTM, ADB’s award-winning high-definition user interface, which offers very intuitive and rapid navigation. With Carbo, viewers can enjoy super-fast channel change, enabled by clear and simple menus that are easy to read from the sofa. On top of that, ADB has replaced the traditional multi-layer menus with a simple carrousel of icons, for an enhanced user experience.

The set-top boxes are also packaged with the multimedia home platform (MHP) middleware, a DVB open-standard software which helps operators achieve minimal total cost of ownership and expedited service deployment. MHP conforms to a set of open standards and thus keeps operators from being “locked in” to a particular vendor if they want to add new applications to their software stack. At the same time, MHP is a Java- and HTML-based language, accessible to millions of developers who are well equipped to build applications for the set-top box. This offers an environment for rapid and cost-effective application development.

“We’re glad to have ADB as our partner, a company that has long enjoyed a reputation as a provider of cutting-edge set-top boxes whose quality and stability are market proven, as well as technologies and solutions that add value for operators,” said Hengkie Liwanto, President Director of First Media. “We take comfort in the fact ADB’s emphasis on user experience, convergence and time-to-market matches our own operational philosophies, and believe ADB will provide invaluable and priceless assistance to us in our effort to become the market leader in the overall pay-TV industry in Indonesia.”