Europe’s largest online gambling group to unveil Sheeva at Las Vegas show


4.12.10 – The Austrian listed Bwin online gambling group is to showcase its modern marketing broadcast medium Sheeva at the Las Vegas NAB Show , which starts today and runs through April 15th, a spokesman revealed this week.
 
The platform, developed in collaboration with broadcast specialist ToolsOnAir, fuses live video, social media and instant messaging, integrated with real-time data from Bwin's online gaming offer, and users will be able to view moderator-controlled Skype chat and live data alongside sports broadcasts.
 
To give a practical example, a soccer game broadcast can be enhanced with inserts from Bwin's gaming line-up and a moderator-controlled Skype chat.
 
Thomas Fürstner, Director of Research and Development at Bwin, summed up the development, saying: “VJ and online gaming culture have merged with Sheeva to form a new interactive TV experience.”
 
Current independent statistics from the Nielsen market research company show that 43 percent of all European TV viewers between 15 and 35 years of age simultaneously watch TV and surf the web on their PC or mobile terminal. This is an incentive for TV and content producers to bring new formats from a platform to every conceivable type of terminal.
 
Sheeva uses a graphical programming language and a framework of audio, video and web technologies in an environment where lighting and studio technology can be controlled by one person, minimising equipment and staffing costs. In the background, all the online-gaming transactions are processed by the existing back-end and billing system.
 
The platform has been designed as a highly flexible system that can broadcast in real time via satellite, the Web and mobile TV in a single production environment.
 
“What we do is transform all kinds of internet messaging and social media platforms into a TV signal, which we then bring to the mobile phones of our customers in HD quality via satellite, as a flash video over the internet or via a terrestrial DVB-H signal,” adds Fürstner. "In so doing, we rely on the Apple Quartz image technology, Quicktime and just:live from the Austrian broadcast specialist ToolsOnAir, which puts the real-time data converted into graphics into a format suitable for TV and the internet.
 
Bwin has excellent outreach, boasting over 20 million registered customers in more than 25 core markets on platforms offering sports betting, poker, casino games, fortune and skill games as well as audio and video streams of top sporting events.