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CGTV Enters Agreement with emuse

LOS ANGELES, California – (PRESS RELEASE) -- Casino and Gaming Television (CGTV), the first 24-hour entertainment and information channel devoted to the millions of gaming lifestyle enthusiasts, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with emuse technologies, developers of the Modelstream(R) suite of authoring tools and a leading producer of single screen interactive television advertising content, to create interactive television (iTV) advertising production and deployment models for CGTV advertisers.

Some of CGTV's acquired and original content from the United Kingdom (U.K.) are already equipped with interactive functionality, allowing viewers to actually play along with casino games being played in the program.

"Interactivity offers CGTV audiences the ideal complement to our gaming- themed programs and advertising," noted CGTV's President and CEO, Nick Rhodes. "emuse has a strong track record of enabling single-screen interactive television advertising in the U.K., and we are very excited to embark on this joint effort to explore, from a programmer's perspective, the potential of iTV advertising on our channel.

The terms of the agreement provide for the parties to immediately start developing multi-middleware single-screen interactive advertisements (iAds) for CGTV's programming. emuse will build iAds using Modelstream and coordinate testing the applications with their technology partners. emuse and CGTV plan to demonstrate their first prototype in San Francisco at the NCTA National Show, April 3-5. This initial demonstration will feature an interactive tour of the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, California, shown layered above a long-form interactive ad for the casino delivered through a cable set-top box. The interactive ad restricts Digital Video Recorders from fast-forwarding through the commercial and it allows users to instantly book reservations at the resort via their remote control.

The Modelstream suite of products enables creative professionals to develop single screen interactive television advertising for various middleware solutions such as OpenTV, OpenCable Applications Platform(TM) (OCAP), Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) and OnRamp. Modelstream's ease of use has been a major factor in the rapid adoption of single screen interactive advertising as a recognized and valuable advertising medium in the U.K. for globally known brands such as Honda, Daimler Chrysler and Unilever.

"There is a lot of pressure on emerging networks to define their worth not only in terms of their content offering to viewers, but more importantly in their financial viability to their carriage partners. With both major satellite operators and several cable companies committed to launching single screen interactive advertising, CGTV's adoption of this interactive medium as part of its business proposition is a very proactive value statement to video service providers," commented John Bryan, emuse U.S. director of operations.

"Now that the technology is in place, we anticipate other innovative networks will follow CGTV's lead in adopting single screen interactive advertising to increase their value to advertising and carriage partners."

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