iacta CAST™

The low-cost, scalable system for iTV walled gardens and portals.

iacta CAST™ is an affordable, scalable, and extensible portal/walled garden system that can deliver platform-optimized content for any middleware, or for any two-way set-top box that contains a presentation engine.

This CAST™-served walled garden features AP feeds in a complete news portal. Contact us for a live demo.

iacta CAST™ features and capabilities include:

• Works with any iTV platform with two-way capability and a presentation engine or browser.
• Intelligent, scalable server built on reliable Open Source standards.
• Pre-installed on hardware, or installed on your existing server.
• Custom templates present your unique portal design optimally for your STB platform.
• Content management tools allow your staff to add content or change your look and feel without needing special knowledge.
• Localization available to serve multiple headends and communities with local content from single CAST™ server.
• Content feeds available, or repurpose content from your existing PC portal.
• Rapid deployment. You can be serving a full portal of services to your subscribers within weeks.

How CAST™ Works

The CAST application server uses custom templates to assemble walled-garden pages with your content and optional news feeds, and present them platform-perfect to your TV subscribers.

Operators have complete control over the look and feel, over all of the content related to their service and service area, and the presentation and placement of advertising. External and third-party content, such as news and weather feeds, can be dropped pre-parsed into the content directory to be incorporated into the walled garden pages by the CAST server.

The system can be set to serve different content into the templates, based on IP address, MAC address, or entry link, to provide local content to your different communities, neighborhoods, or head-ends, from a single CAST™ server.

How CAST Serves Content

News, Weather, and Other Feeds

Iacta CAST's content directory is its source of dynamic data including third-party content feeds. For minimum server load and maximum scalability, the data must be pre-processed into the normalized form that the system inserts directly into the page templates.

If you are currently providing news and weather to a portal for your high-speed data, dial-up, or wireless customers, you can use the feeds you already buy for your walled garden.

Iacta Content Services for CAST™ Portals

If you do not currently have feeds, and do not want to provide and manage them for yourself, Iacta can arrange, manage, and deliver the feeds for you, pre-parsed and ready to serve. If your number of subscribers to be served is relatively small, we may be able to offer shared feed services that substantially reduce your per-subscriber cost of providing data for your walled garden.

Operator and Local Content

Customer service information, local content, and advertising content can be added and updated directly by simply dropping graphics into the proper directory and adding the content with a text editor with a very little knowledge of HTML.

Alternately, the iacta CAST™ walled garden templates for local and operator content can updated using Macromedia® Contribute™, a low-cost Windows-based content authoring tool that features version control and pre-publication review.

Operator and local content also can be updated using the optional CAST™ content authoring and management system, shown in the picture at right. This web-based toolset can be configured for different content areas so that non-technical staff and third parties can provide local content or create advertising for the walled garden. The system separates authoring from publishing, so that content will only appear to your customers after your trusted staff have reviewed and authorized it.

Advertising and Additional Content

Advertising spots are built into the structure of your walled garden design, and depending on the layout, can be assigned by section or globally. A simple ad rotation and ad target template is provided as part of the basic CAST™ system. Add-on modules for CAST can serve localized and personalized advertisements, and are available for community shopping directories and classified advertising services.

Make It Look the Way You Want

When we set up your CAST™ server and walled garden, we work with you to determine the overall site structure that will work well for your plans and your TV platform. We test and validate the structure with sample data on your platform to make sure that it will work the way you want and expect.

Once your structure is determined, your look and feel - graphics, colors, navigation elements, and branding - are all in your control. If you have a company design team, we'll provide them with templates so that they can make your walled garden look just the way you want. If they haven't done TV design before, we'll work with them and provide our training materials to help them understand what will work best on TV. If you don't have designer you'd like to use, we can do your initial design for you.

But even then, you're still in control. You can change your design simply by dropping in new graphics. Your walled garden can always look the way you want, even if you want something new every month.

Extending Iacta CAST

Once installed, Iacta CAST™ can be extended to provide a host of new services for your subscribers as you want to provide them. The list below contains a few that we're developing, but feel free to ask us for anything you've got in mind.

Classified and Directory Advertising

Put your subscribers on TV, by offering classified advertising within your walled garden. The Classified Advertising server also can be used to offer a "Yellow Pages" of local advertising. When your customers can actually make money by selling their goods on your service, or can turn to your walled garden for food delivery instead of hunting down the phone book, they'll be there every day!

Mail4TV™

Iacta's Mail4TV lets you offer your subscribers email on TV. If you are already providing email for your customers with an IMAP server, you can offer them access to their mailbox, directly from the TV. For your customers who don't have email at all, you can empower them with iTV's most popular application as an extra subscriber tier. If you are not currently offering email at all, we can provide an IMAP server with the Mail4TV application.

Customer Service, Bill Presentment, Service Orders

Reduce service calls by making "Help and How To" part of your main walled garden content. If your billing system can be queried, an Iacta CAST module also can present your subscribers with their current bill. The module also may be used allow subscribers to order or change service and schedule service calls, depending upon your provisioning system.

Personalization Server

If you'd like to give every subscriber their own personalized home screen, you'll want to add the CAST™ personalization server. This is a separate (for scalability and performance) database server that remembers your customer by cookie, MAC address or box ID, or user name/password (or any other method) and passes the information to the main CAST server.

Personalization makes it possible to display the subscriber's mail box status ("you've got mail") on their home screen, or to message them ("your bill is past due") directly and individually when they sign onto to the system.

For More Information ...

If you'd like to know more about the potential of CAST™ to provide interactive services for your subscribers, if you would like to schedule a live demo, or if you want to receive our white paper on Iacta CAST™, contact us by email at info-cast@iacta.com, or give us a call at (562) 869-3031. Each installation is custom to serve the individual needs and opportunities of the operator, so if you have a need or an idea that you don't see described, please feel free to discuss it with us.