Web 2.0 for the Television is here with the 2.0 release of Zignal. This is the major product update we have been working on for the last two years now. This week we are shipping our product release candidate to our existing customers for deployments in Europe.

Zignal is the interface for the television in the living room on all your entertainment content.

We use the power of the Internet for transporting and the Web for gathering quality metadata for your content, wherever your content comes from. It may come from digital terrestrial broadcasting, IPTV multicast, on demand or just from your local hard-drive.

We also use the power of Web 2.0 to bring Widgets and Web Applications to your television. This is what we will be serving from our upcoming Zignal Application Marketplace, one of market’s first that is focused specifically on TV apps.

2 of our core 2.0 highlights are:
 

i.) True extendibility & customization capabilities

We are very excited by our new technology framework. It offers the industry best extendibility and customization where everything has been modularized to the utmost.

To start simple, our customers can play with our new Branding Toolkit. The more advanced guys can play with the more powerful Application Development Kit for creating TV Widgets or full blown TV Apps. The serious ones can go all the way using the Platform Developer Kit and even enhance the Zignal server infrastructure along with their custom Zignal Applications.

We now have the unique ability to creat applications that can be run unmodified on any embedded device and regardless of rendering technology. By being able to to re-author only the top layer of the UI so that it take’s full advantage of the fastest available rendering technology and reuse the “complex” bit’s is a brilliant way for us to save time and resources.

ii.) We’re in 100% tandem with our vision on what a true TV experience should be

Most importantly, the consumer’s experience of Zignal. Our dedication on offering the consumer a good entertainment experience can be seen in our new release. Not only that we have the fastest graphics and sharp design by some of Reykjavik’s best designers, it’s that we have been true to our vision of a true TV experience.

If I quote our CTO on the new technology framework, “we started by just learning how to crawl then walk, now we are ready to run!”  – The future surely is interesting. Let’s see if anyone can keep up. ;-)