Snell Brings Screentoo To Morpheus

At its NAB Show press conference Sunday, Snell detailed its partnership with The Application Store (TAS) to demonstrate how Snell’s Morpheus automation could drive essential metadata to second-screen applications on iPads and other mobile data.

As part of the project, Morpheus will supply the TAS “Screentoo” application with real-time data. Explained more plainly, an operator can mesh the larger on-screen content with a real-time, interactive application.

In theory, that would allow a viewer at home watching a program to simultaneously interact with it — to buy a product, for example, or play along with a game show — using a mobile device.

That, of course, gives a user easier access to “highly targeted advertising,” said Neil Maycock, the chief architect at Snell. The technology is already in use in a couple places in Europe, the company said.

Snell also announced a new 3G transmission system that converges fiber connectivity and triax into just one digital transmission, lessening the need to match mobile trucks to the kind of transmission wiring it has. And it is partnering with security provider Irdeto to manage and distribute live content to Internet-connected devices.

At NAB, Snell also is featuring enhancements to its Trinix routers, K2 servers and Maestro master control systems, among others. And it said its latest version of MediaFuse, a multiplatform content system, will arrive in July.

As for trendspotting, Maycock was unsure about the future for 3D. “Last year, everybody had 3D product,” he said. “Then at MIPCOM, nothing.” The next big thing, he predicted, will be a proliferation of Internet-enabled television sets that will create their own content, and a technology revolution.