Advanced Digital Broadcast (www.adbglobal.com), a leading vendor of digital TV set-top-boxes, has unveiled its plans to actively support a successful launch of the Digital Terrestrial TV (DTTV) services in Italy with its i-CAN MHP interactive set-top-box.

In November 2002, ADB was the first company in the world to introduce a DVB MHP set-top-box. Now, one year later, and after receiving the Product Of The Year Award at the Mediacast Show in London in May 2003, the company is set to deliver tens of thousands of units for retail in Italy through various distribution specialists following a nationwide promotional campaign in November to introduce digital TV services to Italian citizens.

The i-CAN MHP set-top-box has been tested for over a year by major broadcasters in Italy, and has been used as field trial units for metering the response of Italians to the new interactive services. Complementarily, the same set-top-box has been used as a reference platform by a significant number of broadcasters, applications developers and TV industry vendors in the European Union and other countries, who have all adopted the MHP interactive standard from the DVB.

"We've used the ADB i-CAN platform for over a year and we're very confident of its stability and interoperability with our interactive services" says Manlio Cruciatti, Director of Technologies at Mediaset, (www.mediaset.it ).

The DVB-T box is powered by the STi5516 MPEG2 processor from STMicroelectronics, (www.st.com) and integrates a V.90 return channel modem to handle interactivity. The software is built on ADB's tradition of performance and reliability, and it incorporates the superior MHP 1.0.2 implementation from Osmosys (www.osmosys.tv). A built-in loader is available, to allow software upgrades over-the-air.

"ADB is committed to supporting the launch in Italy of a fully interactive terrestrial TV service", says Philippe Lambinet, Executive VP, Marketing and Sales. "We've reserved capacity to deliver hundreds of thousands of set-top-boxes during the launch period and through 2004".

About ADB

ADB employs some 350 staff in offices in Switzerland, Australia, Poland, Spain, in the Philippines, the United States and in Taiwan. Of this total staff, more than 200 work as development engineers, principally in the company's Software Engineering facilities in Western Poland