To accommodate the surging demand for its stellar new TV, broadband and voice communications services, Verizon is looking to hire 120 new customer service representatives in New Jersey, at call centers in Madison and Hamilton Township.

Verizon is looking to add 70 representatives in its Hamilton Mega Call Center in Mercer County and 50 in its Madison call center in Morris County. The job postings come as the company continues to aggressively roll out its new fiber network in areas throughout the state. Currently, Verizon is selling its industry-leading FiOS TV service in 180 communities, with many more soon to come.

The BBC Trust has issued its final approval of the BBC Executive's proposals for new on-demand services, with some modifications. The on-demand proposals are the first to go through a Public Value Test.

The Trust's provisional conclusions were subject to an open consultation. A remarkable 10,500 individuals and organisations responded. In the light of those responses, and after careful consideration of all relevant issues, the Trust has amended two of the conditions of its provisional approval.

Zodiac Interactive announces the availability of its Java Middleware solution, PowerRamp. PowerRamp is Zodiac’s high-performance, small footprint Java middleware solution for legacy set-top boxes that can not support a full OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform) environment. Zodiac will be performing private demonstrations of PowerRamp in its booth #4272 during National Cable Television Association’s. The Cable Show ’07 on May 7-9 and attendees may also view PowerRamp at the OCAP Developers Conference on May 6-7. Both events will be held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

PowerRamp, which is based on the JSR 242 specification and an optimized Sun Microsystems CLDC-HI JVM, provides a solution for these legacy set-tops. It allows high-value Java client applications to run on relatively low powered boxes that have limited memory and processing power. It is designed to provide forward compatibility and portability to future OCAP enabled set-top boxes.

B2Digital announces an agreement with Multiband Subscriber Services to provide their Hotelguide television guide channel to B2Digital's customers and properties in the hospitality industry.

"This new service, the delivery of an IP based content management system for digital information, offers us a valuable testing platform for digital content management and categorization technologies. It provides us an important step in our pursuit of the complete implementation of IPTV services, including our plans to acquire, catalogue and deliver digital content to our customers," stated B2Digital's CEO, Robert Russell. "One of the great benefits of IPTV is its ability to offer the viewer an endless number of viewing options. This immense availability of content poses an issue in managing and cataloging the infinite content available. We believe this technology will be directly applicable to the categorization and management of information offered through our IPTV technology. This system should provide the end user the ability to wade through the vast amount of IPTV programming offered and efficiently browse, categorize and choose the content they wish to view."

Swisscom is adding more TV channels to the basic Bluewin TV package, including the English-language BBC Prime. Bluewin TV's basic package already covers a wide range of English-language channels which are no longer broadcast in analog format by some cable TV operators. To date, more than 40,000 customers have signed up for Bluewin TV.

Bluewin TV offers television over the telephone line. Launched by Swisscom in early November 2006, the service now offers more than 120 TV channels and more than 80 radio stations, over 500 top films (video on demand), live sport and up to 30 Teleclub channels. All that's needed is a telephone connection and broadband Internet access from Swisscom. Bluewin TV works without a cable network connection. Basic range of English-language channels to be expanded.

Nokia Siemens Networks has signed a contract with Dialog telecom to deliver and integrate an interactive TV and video-on-demand platform. The test installation will be rolled out this June and the commercial roll out is expected for end of this year.

Dialog telecom has chosen Nokia Siemens Networks to deliver and integrate an IPTV-platform into Dialog’s network for interactive television and video-on-demand services. Nokia Siemens Networks will also supply the set-top boxes for the consumer homes to allow the new multimedia services to be used.

The IPTV solution extends Dialog’s existing portfolio. Subscribers will thus be able to create their own individual service package combining dedicated fixed-line telephony, internet access and innovative fixed-line digital television (IPTV).

NSR releases its newest market research and forecast report "IPTV via Satellite: 2nd Edition." The report provides a concise up-to-date analysis of the satellite IPTV market for both B2B and retail modes, describing the forces shaping the business and presenting forecasts on transponder demand in each region over the next 5 years.

The report concludes that IPTV will produce a variety of satellite opportunities for C-band television distribution to telco headends and Ku-band distribution to consumers in some markets. C-band services are rapidly driving capacity in the United States via Intelsat IPTV and SES IP-Prime respective turnkey offerings targeted at U.S. telcos. Hybrid DTH/broadband services in Europe and retail satellite IPTV plans in Asia point to positive momentum for services delivered via Ku-band capacity as well. The mounting competitive pressure on telcos to diversify their business and increase ARPU through entertainment allows satellites to contribute through their broadcast advantage to capture part of the growth.

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering announces the release of a suite of IPTV quality-of-service test capabilities for its successful Packet Blazer Ethernet test module product line.

EXFO's FTB-8510B Packet Blazer has established the standard for portable IPTV testing with a series of industry-leading features like 100-channel parallel monitoring capability and the support of ETSI TR 101 290 metrics as outlined by digital video broadcast measurement guidelines. This new software suite also includes user-configurable alarm thresholds for media delivery index and other key IPTV metrics, as well as customizable test sequences. In addition, a unique stream discovery capability that automatically identifies valid IPTV streams within the Ethernet layer and links them to user-definable stream names is available, thus simplifying overall QoS analysis for field technicians.

Market News First has selected Akamai to power the delivery of its 24/7 financial news broadcast. The Akamai Media Delivery solution will provide streaming services for Market News First's live broadcasts, available via www.mn1.com.

Market News First chose Akamai as its exclusive streaming service provider due to the consistently superior performance of the Akamai global distribution platform. Akamai beat out four other streaming providers in a head-to-head performance test for the Market News First win. In comparative testing, Akamai's streaming services demonstrated less buffering and faster start-up times resulting in a heightened viewing experience.

Narrowstep has been chosen by Virgin Media to power their online video offering, comprising a range of factual and entertainment content, sports and movies. Narrowstep currently powers more than 150 TV-over-IP channels, including Go Beyond TV for Land Rover, London TV, RomeReports TV, and ITV Local.

Virgin Media uses Narrowstep's TelvOS internet TV technology platform and services to co-ordinate and enable the management and play-out of their recently-launched internet TV offering which can be accessed at http://www.virginmedia.com/ by clicking on one of five genre-themed on-screen buttons: Gaming, Knowledge, Movies, Sport and TV. Content includes a mix of entertainment from Virgin Media Television channels such as LIVINGtv, Bravo, Challenge and Trouble.

Sun Microsystems introduces the Sun Streaming System -- the industry's first massively scalable and cost-effective video delivery platform for cable and telecommunications operators, which helps operators increase subscriber revenue by offering new video-based services and personalized, unique video streams to each consumer. Unveiled at the 6th annual Tribeca Film Festival in Lower Manhattan, a world-class venue for the international film community to demonstrate the power of film, the system leverages the Solaris 10 Operating System to deliver the highest video streaming capacity in the industry by enabling cost-effective personalized video delivery over existing optical network infrastructure -- consequently reshaping the economics and quality of video delivery services.

DISCOP, a TV content market focused on Central and Eastern Europe has unveiled plans for DISCOPRO, a new day-long conference and networking event dedicated to co-production opportunities in the region. The announcement was made jointly by Patrick Jucaud, General Manager, DISCOP and Rick Feldman, President and Chief Executive Officer, National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), DISCOP’s joint partner.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the Multimedia Research Group, Inc report: IPTV Market Leaders Report 2007 to their offering.

This Market Leaders report identifies which IPTV systems and software companies are leading each of the IPTV markets globally and within the four regional markets that we track. We have measured market position using estimates of the actual number of active IPTV subscribers that are using or being supported by the company’s products for all product segments except the Video Headends. For the Video Headends we have measured market position using estimates of the number of IPTV channels that are to be provided using the company’s products. Since a Video Headend may support two thousand or two million subscribers, the number of channels is a much better measure of each company’s market position. This methodology gives a good measure of the relative position of each company as well as the prospects for future growth.

Recent Strategy Analytics research forecasts that 90 percent of UK homes will be watching High Definition TV by 2020 as long as Ofcom allocates spectrum on the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform for HDTV. Without HD on DTT, a mere 60 percent of homes would be watching HDTV by 2020. This report, "HDTV and DTT: The Impact Of Platform Evolution Decisions On HDTV Adoption Scenarios," suggests that the decision on HD-DTT is closely tied to overall policy on the future of public service broadcasting (PSB), and that the availability of HD-DTT is necessary to ensure that PSB does not become unduly weakened relative to pay and commercial television services.

Command Audio Corp. announces that Scientific Atlanta has purchased a license to use Command Audio’s patented PVR (personal video recorder, also known as digital video recorder, or DVR) technology.

Under terms of the agreement, Scientific Atlanta acquired a license to use Command Audio’s patented technology in all of its PVR set-top box products. The worldwide agreement runs for the life of Command Audio’s patents. No financial terms were disclosed.

Command Audio previously has licensed its patents and technology to industry leaders in the consumer and automotive electronics fields, including Motorola, ReplayTV, Sony, XM Satellite Radio and iBiquity Digital’s HD Radio.