Cancom has struck a deal to be the exclusive satellite partner of Liberate Technologies in the Canadian market. Cancom will use Liberate's "middleware" platform to deliver interactive tv applications from numerous content providers to its Star Choice direct-to-home subscribers and cable customers.

The operating system from Liberate, out of San Carlos, California, was especially attractive to Cancom after the former completed its acquisition of London, Ont.'s VirtualModem technologies in March. These technologies expand the Liberate tv platform to a wider range of digital satellite set-top boxes, allowing existing customers to receive some of the interactive applications on their current boxes. Cancom expects the boxes that will allow for the full complement of applications will be available next year.

Richard Stursberg, president and ceo of Cancom, foresees Web-style applications designed for tv.

While these types of applications would be built by deliverers such as Cancom in joint ventures, there are also interactive features that can be built directly into programming streams.

"If you're a sports broadcaster, you can link to your programming stream - [which] you're transmitting in realtime - a set of applications transmitted simultaneously with it and locked into it," Stursberg explains. "[The viewer] could be watching a baseball game, and streamed into the video would be data - for example, when a guy comes up to bat, you can click on the batter, and then suddenly his statistics will come up - his last at bat, what the count is, etc." He sees this type of interactivity ultimately expanding to include such features as multiple camera angles and e-commerce.

"Now that we have the platform, we're looking forward to having a conversation with the Canadian broadcasters, to get them up and running in interactive mode," Stursberg says.