[PR] ALi supports Opera in its HbbTV STB platform

Taipei, Taiwan, and Oslo, Norway — April 18, 2012

ALi Corporation, a leading set-top-box (STB) system-on-chip (SoC) solution provider, today announced that its hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) supported STB platform is ready for mass production. ALi and Opera Software will work together to bring a better HbbTV experience to ALi-based STBs.

The adoption of HbbTV is spreading in Europe. It is already implemented in retail STBs, connected TVs and other devices such as game players from many leading TV and STB manufacturers. To create an optimal HbbTV experience, ALi and Opera offer a friendly interface to browse web content on TVs for traditional remote controls or their companion devices, as well as robust rendering engines for television with TV rendering (TVR) technology, supporting features such as adapting internet pages to suit TV screens, anti-flicker filtering, picture-in-picture viewing, etc. ALi has pre-ported Opera to its new STB SoC solution, optimizing the Opera Devices Software Development Kit (SDK) for specific middleware, which reduces time to market and development costs.

Tony Chang, General Manager of ALi’s International Business Unit, said, “ALi has gained a prestigious reputation for our cost and performance of STB SoCs. We are well prepared and glad to extend our proficiency in the STB industry to keep abreast with the new era of hybrid-TV devices. ALi’s HbbTV-supported STB platform now supports Opera, one of the most commonly used browsers in the consumer electronics industry, and it supports all the mainstream video streaming formats, thereby providing easy development of applications for interactive services. By putting forth the pioneering STB platform with HbbTV support, we again secure our leading position in the global dynamic TV service market.”

“Opera’s family of web browsers have been widely adopted by more than 250 million users worldwide,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software. “For years, Opera has continued to improve the web browsing technology in HbbTV and make it compliant with up-to-date industry standards. With the introduction of the HbbTV-supported STB platform with ALi Corp., the TV world and internet world have come together. We are glad to deliver more seamless and enhanced hybrid TV devices to people all over the world.”

The Opera Devices SDK uses the most recent version of Opera’s rendering engine, Opera Presto, which powers the latest Opera desktop and mobile browsers. The latest version incorporates improvements in CSS, DOM and JavaScript modules. Moreover, the Opera browser uses hardware acceleration, using DirectFB to speed up rendering and animations, providing smoother web browsing experience on hardware limited devices.

About ALi Corporation

ALi Corporation is a leading innovator and developer in the set-top box (STB) system-on-chip (SoC) market. By fully leveraging its core expertise in the digital audio/video and set-top box industry, ALi solutions are recognized for their high levels of integration, superior performance reliability, premier customer oriented service and compelling cost structure. ALi has a market-proven track record of more than 300 million unit cumulative shipments in the set-top box market and more than 120 Pay TV operators have also deployed its solutions globally.

ALi Corporation was founded in 1987 with headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan, R&D centers as well as sales offices in Hsinchu, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Seoul, and technical support teams throughout Asia. For more information, please visit www.alitech.com.