–Service Serves as Access Point to QVC’s New “Beauty Channel”

Home shopping programmer, QVC UK, has tapped Portland, Oregon-based interactive TV authoring solutions provider, Ensequence, to revamp its interactive TV application on the Sky platform, enabling the application to serve as the launch point for a new channel devoted to beauty programming. According to QVC UK, Ensequence completely redesigned and rebuilt the application, and the company’s professional services team managed the app’s deployment and its integration with QVC UK’s transactional, fulfillment and content-management systems. QVC UK says that Ensequence’s technology enables it to offer its viewers a wide range of interactive product-browsing options, and to change the app’s featured products each day. Viewers can use their remote to choose between four video channels offered by the app and to purchase on-air-featured products from any of them. “We’re excited to be working with QVC UK to enable the most advanced interactive television shopping channel in the world,” Ensequence CEO, Dalen Harrison, said in a prepared statement. “With interactive television, QVC UK is increasing viewer engagement and making it simple for viewers to purchase products directly from their television using their remote control.”

The new QVC UK application’s four video screens are devoted to 1) a live feed of QVC’s linear TV channel; 2) a one-hour-timeshifted feed of the channel; 3) a video feed on products featured in QVC’s “Today’s Special Value” promotion; and 4) the new Beauty Channel. The latter is played out and managed by a specialist broadcast planning, asset management and transmission system that was developed in partnership with PubliTronic under contract to TX2 and that uses the Indigo server and customized Cobalt control software. According to QVC UK, the system automatically segments and stores video of the beauty products featured on the channel to an Isilon iQ storage cluster from Pharos UK, and allows QVC UK’s planning department to select appropriate videos for transmission. As the system is integrated with QVC UK’s real-time business systems, only videos of those products that are currently in stock are available for the transmission play-lists. Product sell-outs are automatically handled by either removing from the play-list the clips that feature them, or by real-time generation of on-air sell-out graphics. According to QVC UK, the Isilon iQ storage system will hold a library of six months of beauty clips, but initially the channel will offer four hours of looped video. “Ensequence software and services have provided us with the capability to enhance and develop our own on-air interactive applications, and PubliTronic has provided us with our first end-to-end tapeless workflow and transmission system,” QVC UK’s head of media technology, Paul Murphy, said in a prepared statement. “Combined with Isilon’s iQ storage provided by Pharos, we now have a robust and flexible way of allowing our customers to make considered purchases of beauty products from the wealth of broadcast-quality videos that we have available.”