BSkyB

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Britain's independent broadcasting company, has used IONA Technologies' Orbix® to deliver a range of innovative services to their web site. One of many new services from BSkyB includes browser access to the company's TV schedules with the added functionality of an advanced search engine powered by Orbix, allowing visitors to the website to dynamically search and retrieve programming information for each of Sky's channels. As part of BSkyB's activities around the World Cup, they have also built an interactive, web-based fantasy football game using Orbix.

To publicize the company's range of broadcasting services to subscribers and non-subscribers alike, BSkyB's Internet Strategy is focused on delivering solutions which make their web site dynamic and customer friendly. The search engine integrates their Broadcast Support System (BSS), which holds the company's entire scheduling information on an Oracle database, with a Java client which publishes BSkyB's episode listings. Furthermore, to support the advanced search engine functionality, BSkyB required a technology capable of mapping an inputted TV schedule request to an episode listing. Both challenges were overcome using IONA's OrbixWeb™ and OrbixNames™products. OrbixWeb is the Java version of IONA's best selling Orbix product and OrbixNames enables developers to track multiple objects in a given application.

"With interest in the Internet reaching record levels, we could not afford to ignore its potential as a valuable medium to publicize our services,'' commented Andy Reeves, head of technical services and operations at BSkyB. "The challenge for BSkyB was finding the best method of adding new services to our web site in the most timely fashion, bearing in mind the range of different platforms and technologies which needed to interoperate. The ease of use and platform-coverage of IONA's Orbix product range was crucial to the success of our Internet developments. In addition, we were impressed by IONA's approach to partnership with other software vendors, an approach which eased our transition into middleware development.''

BSkyB's fantasy football game, World Cup Manager, enables visitors to participate in the excitement of the World Cup by offering the opportunity to select and monitor the progress of their chosen players throughout the tournament. World Cup Manager leverages unique services which run on the Sun Solaris UNIX platform; OrbixWeb enables easy integration between these services and Sky's Windows NT-based web platform.

"Organizations are building more powerful web-based solutions to deliver high quality, dynamic content. To build these applications, developers need to knit together their existing IT infrastructure with the latest web technologies,'' commented Colin Newman, executive vice president of marketing at IONA Technologies. "Orbix enables developers to integrate these technologies. It is an open, proven technology for production-ready deployment and ensures the very latest technology can be added when required. BSkyB's seamless integration of the Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT platforms underlines the value that Orbix offers.''

BSkyB is the world's most successful satellite pay-television operator with a turnover of (pound) 1,270 million and pre-tax profits of (pound) 314 million. A fundamental belief in programming excellence and choice has enabled BSkyB to drive the business forward and in the process, create one of the great British brands: Sky Television. BSkyB has led a revolution in entertainment, innovation and choice. In less than a decade it has established a leading position in sports and movie programming and has been responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of channels available. These initiatives have helped BSkyB expand its subscriber base to 6.37 million subscribers via satellite and cable.