SMS hits TV before new fall schedule

The biggest new premiere on television this year may not beat the sixth season of “24,” but hopefully it will beat out “American Idol.”

With Caller ID to the TV leading the way as the star of the new enhanced converged services that involve the nation's most addictive media channel — the TV — short message service (SMS) will get its shot this year in a supporting role. Who knows, it may just upstage the star.

Integra5, the Burlington, Mass.-based provider of converged service delivery solutions, offered a sneak peek at its new SMS to TV service this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Called the i-Communicate applications suite (part of Integra5's i5 C-SDP), the solution converges services on wireless devices, landline facilities, TVs and PCs. The company said this will be the first service that enables SMS communications between cell phones and TVs and PCs using landline numbers.

“We allow services providers to look at all the devices in the home, not just to IPTV boxes,” said Meredith Flynn-Ripley, CEO of Integra5. “We recognize the hybrid network, and that's the strength of our platform.”

Floorwalkers at CES were able to send text messages from a cell phone to a TV in a real-world, home-based scenario. In turn, they could then use the TV remote to reply to the message with pre-set responses or to trigger a “click-to-call” response that initiates a call between the home landline phone and the cell phone that sent the text message.

“Click to Call gets real exciting when you're doing it from your television set,” Flynn-Ripley said.

If that ain't innovation, what is? Integra5 also added some personalization to the feature. If the person sending the text message has been personalized via the i5 network address book, the SMS will be flagged with a picture and nickname of the sender on the TV screen, similar to Integra5's Picture Caller ID service.

The company also demonstrated its TV/PC Picture Caller ID applications and its Message Waiting Indication application. The SMS application should be generally available this summer.

The i5 C-SDP has been deployed since 2004. and is IMS-compatible and based on a distributed, network-based architecture. Currently, it can scale to support millions of subscribers and provide application-level personalization across multiple devices and network architectures.

On the road map for Integra is a feature that allows calls coming in from a mobile phone that has bad coverage to be redirected to a home phone or PC. “We make the features available for both because the younger you are, the more likely you are to default to your PC than the TV,” Flynn-Ripley said.

This year Integra5 also will introduce video-on-demand telescoping, which allows a user to receive alerts such as sports results and click to see the information or video clip. Channel telescoping will allow users to do the same, but go to a channel such as for weather alerts.