Verizon FiOS TV Customers in Florida Have a Powerful New Way to Find and Enjoy Home Entertainment

Verizon FiOS TV Customers in Florida Have a Powerful New Way to Find and Enjoy Home Entertainment

Verizon's New Interactive Media Guide Makes It Easy to Search and Manage Multimedia Content Throughout the Home

TAMPA, Fla., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing to transform home entertainment, Verizon has introduced FiOS TV's interactive media guide to the company's growing number of TV customers in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Sarasota and Manatee counties. The new guide helps customers quickly and easily find and enjoy content from TV listings, video-on-demand catalogs and digital video recorders as well as personal music and photos from the home network.

The guide will now be a standard feature for FiOS TV customers wherever the service is offered. Future versions of the guide will add Internet radio, videos, podcasts and games to the FiOS TV multimedia platform.

[Note: an online demonstration of the Interactive Media Guide is available at http://verizonfios.com/img/. Screen shots of the IMG suitable for publication are available at http://verizon.wieck.com/ . Search all images for full availability.]

In addition to Florida, FiOS TV's interactive media guide is now available to customers in parts of California, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia. It will soon be available in more states. There is no additional charge for the guide.

"Our new interactive media guide is the latest exciting development from FiOS TV," said Shawn Strickland, Verizon vice president of video solutions. "We've capitalized on our investment in an ultra-fast, highly responsive fiber-optic network to deliver a customer experience that marries the best interactivity of the Web with the highest-quality programming experience in the marketplace. The interactive media guide erases the lines between TV, Internet and personal media, and makes it easy for customers to personalize and enjoy media throughout their homes."

Guide Capitalizes on the Power of the Network

The first release of Verizon's new interactive media guide pulls together content from a variety of sources -- broadcast TV, Verizon's more than 12,000- title video-on-demand library and the subscriber's own DVR recordings -- into one media management system. Customers who have FiOS TV's Media Manager, part of its innovative Home Media DVR service, can also search, organize and enjoy their digital photos and music with a few clicks of the remote control. Over the next year, subscribers will be able to manage additional content like games, podcasts and Internet video through the same guide, from the comfort of their own living rooms.

Verizon provides FiOS services over the nation's most advanced, all- digital fiber-optic network that reaches all the way to customers' homes, and the interactive media guide is one example of how Verizon is using the FiOS network to make life better for customers.

When customers use the media guide to search for content, such as video- on-demand titles or broadcast schedules, they instantly get relevant results, thanks to the network's high bandwidth and fast response times. And, because Verizon combines powerful search servers in the network with innovative search routines, the search results will even reflect current news topics. For example, if two actors have the same initials, but one of them has recently been in the news, the results of a search on those initials will treat the "newsworthy" actor as more relevant to the search than results describing the other actor.

Verizon is extending the network-based capabilities when customers are not at home. Within the next year, FiOS customers will be able to use cell phones and the Internet to manage their home entertainment -- including scheduling recordings on their Home Media DVR.

Verizon's world-class software-development team built the new guide software, working round-the-clock and around the world and using technology licensed by a variety of cutting-edge providers. Before rolling out the interactive media guide to customers in Indiana and Rhode Island, Verizon refined and tested the application's design and usability over 18 months with more than 2,000 consumers in Boston and Dallas and performed field trials with customers in New Jersey this spring.

Transforming the User Experience

"We listened to our customers and created a next-generation guide that is attractive, amazingly responsive and easy to use," Strickland said. "No other experience on the market can match the innovation we're delivering to customers with the interactive media guide."

Verizon designed the on-screen guide with the vibrant colors, graphics and easy-to-use interfaces that customers have come to expect from the best in consumer electronics. Strickland said a key design principle was to help customers reach content with the fewest clicks of the remote control, including video-on-demand and DVR programs. Navigation is intuitive and can be done with the remote control's arrows and "OK" button or by using the remote's shortcut keys.

Another key design principle was to give customers choice in how they interact with FiOS TV. Customers can search for content using cell phone- style text entry, a virtual keyboard or a simple scroll wheel, all onscreen. As the customer enters each text character in the search, the guide responds with corresponding actor names, TV shows, on-demand titles and more. Adding characters refines the search rapidly.

Subscribers can customize their search by choosing to see all channels, HDTV channels only or a list of their favorite channels. They also can select the size of the guide's screen with a choice of full-screen, half-screen or mini-screen views.

More information about FiOS TV, fiber optics and other broadband services and applications is available at http://www.verizonfios.com/.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) , headquartered in New York, is a leader in delivering broadband and other wireline and wireless communication innovations to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. Verizon Wireless operates America's most reliable wireless network, serving 63.7 million customers nationwide. Verizon's Wireline operations include Verizon Business, which delivers innovative and seamless business solutions to customers around the world, and Verizon Telecom, which brings customers the benefits of converged communications, information and entertainment services over the nation's most advanced fiber-optic network. A Dow 30 company, Verizon has a diverse workforce of nearly 238,000 and last year generated consolidated operating revenues of more than $88 billion. For more information, visit http://www.verizon.com/.

VERIZON'S ONLINE NEWS CENTER: Verizon news releases, executive speeches and biographies, media contacts, high quality video and images, and other information are available at Verizon's News Center on the World Wide Web at http://www.verizon.com/news. To receive news releases by e-mail, visit the News Center and register for customized automatic delivery of Verizon news releases.

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Source: Verizon

CONTACT: Bob Elek of Verizon, +1-813-483-2541, bob.elek@verizon.com

Web site: http://www.verizon.com/
http://www.verizonfios.com/

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Profile: International Entertainment