Cork-headquartered digital television firm Digisoft has won a deal to provide a system that enables the regional government of Lombardia in Italy, Lombardia Servizi, to provide government information services by digital terrestrial television (DTT) to its citizens.
“The takeup of DTT in Italy has been very strong; there are now over four million families in Italy watching free-to-air digital TV,” said Fintan Mc Kiernan, senior vice-president, sales at DigiSoft.tv.
“As almost all of the DTT set-top boxes in Italy are multimedia home platform (MHP) enabled, it means that all of these families can utilise these new services from the comfort of their armchairs at home.”
By using DigiSoft’s iTVBox, Lombardia Servizi will have a complete in-house capability to develop their own citizen-centric “T-Government” applications, which they can then launch on free-to-air local or national TV channels.
Lombardia Informatica have also joined DigiSoft’s international developer group which will allow them to tap in to and share interactive TV development capabilities with a wider research and development community across the globe.
“Interactive TV is changing the way people interact with their government,” said Antonio Lasi, general manager of Lombardia Informatica.
“The Digisoft Platform will help to make government services more accessible and more user-friendly. It’s easy to imagine that people would much prefer to submit a government application from the comfort of their own home by simply using their remote control and their TV rather than losing half a day crossing town to wait in line to perform the same operation.”
DigiSoft’s iTVBox is a complete development solution that will enable Lombardia Servizi to rapidly design and develop interactive government applications, so-called T-Government applications, for free-to-air digital television in Italy.
Lombardia Informatica, the technology division of the regional government of Lombardia, has been involved in a number of T-Government projects as part of the Italian Government’s drive to make government services available to Italian citizens via interactive DTT.
By developing the applications using the iTVBox and the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard of MHP a multitude of local government services can be made available on free-to-air TV in the form of interactive T-Government applications.
By John Kennedy
