MediaHighway
MediaHighway is the business name for a software solution developed by HyperPanel Lab (formerly Cojyp) to create interactive applications for digital television.
At the origin of this system in the early 90's, the HyperPanel OS product consisted of two elements:
- an HyperPanel runtime, which was a middleware that ran on a PC, on a workstation or dedicated equipment;
- an HyperPanel edit which was a software for writing applications that could run in a target equipped with the HyperPanel runtime.
The first implementation of this software suite was carried out in the 1990s as part of a computer-aided interpretation system of SPOT satellite images. The first achievement in the civilian field was a fixed image server made for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Then comes an offer for the interactive digital television based on the HyperPanel runtime and the HyperPanel edit: the runtime is the execution tool in the set-top box and the edit is the interactive application development tool.
HyperPanel Lab will license this software solution in December 1994 to Canal+ company.
In April 1996, Canal Satellite, a subsidiary of Canal +, launches with HyperPanel Lab's software solution the first pay-per-view interactive digital satellite television equipped with a Visa card reader. The digital boxes (set-top-box) were equipped with HyperPanel’s runtime and edit, both customized by the HyperPanel Lab teams to enable the creation and execution of downloadable interactive digital applications. The success of the solution follows the one of digital television. Subsequently, MediaHighway is quickly adopted by many operators.
Building on the success of this first version based on the HyperPanel runtime, Canal+ will later use the MediaHighway and MediaGuard brands to split the HyperPanel runtime into two products: MediaHighway for the interactive middleware part and MediaGuard for the access control part. These two brands are then hosted in a dedicated subsidiary called Canal + Technology.
In September 2002, Canal+ sold its Canal+ Technologie subsidiary to Technicolor (formerly Thomson Multimédia).
In December 2003, MediaHighway was resold to NDS and MediaGuard was resold to the Kudelski group.
The MediaHighway solution is currently owned by the PERMIRA fund, which acquired it from CISCO in 2018, which acquired it from NDS in March 2012.
Description
The solution developed by HyperPanel Lab provides scalable software in decoders. In particular, it is possible to modify the presentation of the information to the viewer as well as the manner of interacting with the decoder. The main advantage of the runtime developed in 1990 by HyperPanel Lab is hardware interoperability, that is to say that the same software application works on all types of hardware (processors and different peripheral circuits) and gives the same result. The broadcasting operator can thus give in its interactive menus a unique image, according to its own graphic charter. This regardless of the type of receiving terminal and with the possibility of instant update.
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