Press Release

• Espial Escape will deliver Walled-Garden & Web Portal services to 1000 home test sites in the Belgacom DSL network, beginning this November

Ottawa, Canada November 2, 2004 – Espial today announced that Espial Escape will be deployed by Belgacom, Belgium’s leading telecommunications company, to provide HTML rendering capabilities to deliver Wall-Garden and Web content for their IPTV Set-Top Boxes. Services that will be accessible with the Escape browser include Media-on-demand, local news-weather-sports, chat, e-shopping and the ability to surf Web content and manage your email. Espial is a leading provider of set-top box and mobile handset software, specializing in IPTV applications.

“Espial Escape’s pre-integrated and customizable user interface allowed Belgacom to get to market quickly,” says Dr. Neale Foster, Director of Marketing, TV. “Our market approach of rich functionality, standards-compliance and built for TV feature set allows set-top box manufacturers and triple play telcos to deploy with confidence.”

Users can expect intuitive interfaces that make access to Media Services, Web browsing, email and chat services quick and simple for every level of user. The modular architecture of Espial Escape future-proofs the Belgacom offering, ensuring that the carrier can introduce new services or applications as the need arises. The graphical user interface is easily customizable using traditional mark up languages and allows Belgacom to up-sell or cross-sell new services.

Easily integrated with any middleware or VOD supplier, Espial software can scale to meet the requirements of low-end to high-end set-top boxes. Beginning in November, the Belgacom IPTV project will be tested by one thousand families in the zones of Ghent, Brussels and Liege.

About Belgacom
Belgacom is the leading telecommunications company in Belgium and a market leader in a number of areas, including retail and wholesale fixed-line telephony services, mobile communications services and broadband data and Internet services.

About Espial
Espial is the leading provider of rapidly customizable software for set-top boxes and mobile handsets. Espial applications and enabling technologies include Graphical User Interfaces, Video On Demand, Electronic Program Guides, Content Portals, Web browsers and interactive applications. Espial advances the exchange of media between CE devices, across convergent home, wireless and automotive networks.

Espial software eases your time to market and BOM considerations with highly performant applications and tools that are pre-integrated with popular middleware and VOD servers. The company is the recipient of the Deloitte and Touche 'Fast 50' top companies in Canada, two years running. Espial software is deployed and accredited for more than 100 consumer designs such as Motorola, Siemens, Sumitomo Network Electronics, Thomson, Philips, LodgeNet, OnCommand, S-Net Systems, and i3Micro Technologies.

For more information contact:

Yvonne Robinson
Director, Marketing Communications
Espial
613.230.4770
yrobinson@espial.com

Jan Margot
Belgacom Press Relations
+32 2 202 85 01
jan.margot@belgacom.be