[Lew]

I'm pretty sure you'll probably find that it's Sky who are coding the red button software. It's a "soft launch". In other words, they'll try out the software on the live system a bit at a time to see what works and what doesn't and then refine the software for the next event they test it on. Liberate is a completely different system to OpenTV (or whatever Sky are using these days) so everything has to be written from scratch to work within the capabilities of VM's system. From a software development and testing point of view they're doing things correctly; you develop and test the software in small, easily manageable stages rather than trying to do everything at once.

It was a similar situation back in the NTL/Telewest days with the BBC red button when they had to try to recreate similar functionality to the red button app on Sky on 3 different cable systems (Telewest, original NTL, ex-C&W). Those of us in the original NTL areas had to wait absolutely ages for various upgrades to hardware at NTL's end and software on the old Pace boxes before we got the same functionality as the Telewest and ex-C&W customers got.

I'm sure Sky will have received feedback from VM about how well the first trial worked both at VM's end and on the various STBs so that they can refine and optimise it for the next event, where the process will repeat until it's at a satisfactory level to be used full-time. Then they'll start working on getting it up and running on the TiVo boxes, although I'd hope that it'll be easier for them to code for Flash.