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MHP specialists Nionex GmbH and Icareus Ltd. sign contract for pontegra sales partnership

Cooperation with sales partner in Finland is an important step in the worldwide marketing of MHP browser pontegra.

Guetersloh/Dortmund/Munich/Espoo 12 February 2003 - Effective immediately, the Finnish IDTV specialist Icareus Ltd. will begin marketing pontegra in Finland. pontegra is an MHP browser created by the German company Nionex GmbH, the universal service provider for portal and content management solutions within the DirectGroup Bertelsmann. The partnership with Icareus takes into account the fact that Finland is currently a leader worldwide in the introduction of MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), the international standard for interactive television. Icareus Ltd. has been a part of this development from the start and has already successfully launched their own MHP solutions.

As a result of this joint venture, Finnish television stations, cable network operators and content providers can profit directly from the MHP know-how of both companies and the product pontegra. pontegra by Nionex is the first browser based on MHP which is oriented to the new DVB-HTML standard for MHP content. The browser makes it possible to generate new interactive services on the current MHP 1.0.2 Set Top Boxes using standard authoring tools and Web-based workflow components. This is an important step toward making MHP successful:
instead of time-consuming and complicated Java programming, MHP services can quickly and easily be developed by web designers who know HTML and use tools they are familiar with. This is especially advantageous for smaller companies offering MHP services.

pontegra can be loaded as a standard MHP application onto an MHP 1.0.2 Set Top Box and demonstrates the following features:

• Support of a fully compatible DVB-HTML subset that is oriented to market needs
• Expansible as a result of an MHP and DVB-HTML compatible plug-in mechanism
• Parallel access to DVB broadcast content and the Internet over a return channel
• Low code volume
• Fast parser and rendering algorithms
• Intelligent pre-fetching and caching mechanisms

"We are happy with Icareus to have found such a competent sales partner in Finland. Our talks with potential customers in Finland have shown that there is great interest in a solution like pontegra. It pleases us even more because the experience of Finnish MHP service providers and Their current solutions has shown us that we have invested in the right concept by developing pontegra: moving away from proprietary content formats to open standards for which available and familiar standard tools can be used," explains Horst Gosewehr, managing director of Nionex
GmbH.