SureWest Teams With BIAP to Launch One of the First EBIF Cable Television Interactive Platforms and Applications

SureWest Teams With BIAP to Launch One of the First EBIF Cable Television Interactive Platforms and Applications

LAUNCH IN COMPANY'S KANSAS CITY SYSTEM

PLANO, Texas, Oct. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading independent communications holding company SureWest Communications (NASDAQ:SURW) has installed and deployed a new platform for television interactivity in a subsidiary cable system operating in the greater Kansas City market. The EBIF platform and applications are one of the first in-market cable deployments of the EBIF standard in an established cable system. These applications and the EBIF platform were all created by iTV leader BIAP Inc.

This new platform uses the EBIF (Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format) standard, which was developed by Cable Labs to promote affordable and uniform television interactivity across multiple platforms. SureWest's Kansas City subsidiary is one of the first cable operators to launch an EBIF platform in its headend and to deploy to its entire digital subscriber base applications in the EBIF standard.

Some of the applications currently available to SureWest digital television subscribers include Yellow Pages on TV, eBay on TV, Fantasy Football and My TVi, a local news and information service that allows the viewer to personalize certain content such as stock tickers, sports teams and weather.

"These new interactive applications deliver added value to our customers and help make their lives more convenient," said Ken Johnson, vice president and general manager of operations, Kansas for SureWest. "This EBIF standard is available to all of our television subscribers and we believe it offers an excellent added benefit for our valued customers. This new standard also places our company and our customers in a great position to benefit as interactive product browsing becomes more of a reality."

"We think we have the best engineering and scientific group in the industry," said Tim Peters, CEO of BIAP. "They were able in a short period of time to build an EBIF platform for cable operators, a user agent to display everything, tools for future third party development and of course translate our existing applications that had been running on SARA, into the EBIF standard."

The primary purpose of the EBIF standard is to enable interactivity -- a feature that will drive many new viewer participation initiatives. Both the cable and broadcast industries have fully embraced the EBIF standard as the primary application platform to deliver these advanced features across the full range of deployed digital cable set-top boxes.

About BIAP

BIAP (Broadband Interactive Applications) is the only company supplying the cable industry with all of the critical tools for interactive television advertising and programming. These tools include the ETV Platform, a broad offering of applications and a complete portfolio of products for advanced advertising called Canoe in a Box. BIAP's partners include: NBC, eBay, and Hearst's Talking Phone Book. Applications in deployment include eBay on TV, Fantasy Football, Yellow Pages on TV and PITV, a local information service that can be personalized. BIAP is currently available in over twenty million boxes across the United States. BIAP has received two patents for its technology and has three Emmy nominations for its applications. Corporate headquarters are in Plano, Texas, with research and development in Sterling, Virginia.

About SureWest Communications

Headquartered in Northern California for more than 90 years, the company expanded into the Kansas City region in February 2008 with the acquisition of Everest Broadband, Inc. and offers bundled residential and commercial services that include IP-based digital and high-definition television, high-speed Internet, Voice over IP, and local and long distance telephone. Its fiber-to- the-premise IP-based network in the Sacramento region features the fastest symmetrical Internet speeds in the nation at up to 50 Mbps. In its Kansas City market (http://www.surewestkc.com/), 75 percent of the company's customers subscribe to at least three services.

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Source: BIAP Inc.

CONTACT: Ellen Cooper of BIAP; +1-646-419-0006, ellencooper@biap.com; or
Vivian Cazanis of SureWest, v.cazanis@surewest.com

Web site: http://www.biap.com/
http://www.surewestkc.com/

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Profile: International Entertainment