DENVER – There have been many “holy grails” that the cable industry has pursued over the years. Some, like high speed internet and telephony, have paid off handsomely.
Others, like interactive television, have remained like the real grail: much talked about and oft pursued, with many false grails presented (we’re thinking about you Wink and Liberate) but never found to be stable – or deployable on a truly mass scale.
But it is looking like 2010 just might be the year iTV rises from the dust to become something real. Video, broadband and phone are mature or maturing products and in the face of increasing competition, MSOs are looking for ever more products that will be “sticky” as they like to say, for their customers.
The same problems that inhibited iTV five or 10 years ago still exist: multiple proprietary hardware and software platforms, multiple set top manufacturers and various versions of the boxes, dating back to the DCT and Explorer 2000’s (of which there are still millions in the market).
The changes now, though, are that programmers, MSOs and developers are on board, pushing iTV like they never have, building off a standard, EBIF (enhanced TV binary interchange format), that will work nationwide, on any set top, whether they are multimedia tru2way capable gateways or dumb-as-a-post-by-comparison 2000-series decoders.
Showtime’s vice-president of iTV, David Preisman says the cable channel that brings you Dexter chose to embrace the limitations of EBIF and constructed its iTV application to work with the limitations of those early generations of boxes (like a color palette of just eight hues).
Right now, Showtime prepares content and applications for 11 different platforms in order to distribute content on demand and has created an elegant iTV app served from the MSO’s VOD system which sells Showtime “and is not constrained by a 30-second spot,” he said.
It’s a chain of content (video and graphics) which users can call up when they are searching for movies or TV shows from their cable operator that then sells Showtime (it targets non-Showtime subs) by talking up the service and offering a free episode, for example. It then will interface with the MSO billing system and take the order too. “It’s instant gratification for the operator and customer. You didn’t have to answer a call at the call centre… it generates revenue from day one,” he told CTAM conference attendees during an iTV session Monday in Denver.
The application has other branches which also allow viewers – as many of the old iTV products had in the past – call up certain text features, such as a tale of the tape during live sports like boxing and MMA.
(Ed note: No one was talking about ordering a pizza with their STB)
Comcast’s senior director of video product development, James Mumma, said the big MSO looks at iTV applications in three ways: those bound to the content; EPG extensions; and other widgets. And, they have to support “four legs”: the consumer, advertiser, programmer and distributor.
Mumma showed some apps, like offering a coupon during a commercial (something that has been possible for a decade, actually), delivered with the click of the remote, and the potential to deliver real-time sports stats, too.
But even with these limited applications, a ton of things still have to get done by the MSOs and the developers to make them work on all STBs. “There’s a real laundry list,” added Mumma. “It takes us quite some time to bring an application in house and get it to our markets.”
The cool iTV will come when tru2way multimedia boxes are the norm (which is some ways off). Rather than the static pages through EBIF which have to be presented in MPEG2 one at a time, “an overlay of grungy graphics,” said NDS vice-president of broadband and interactive Steve Tranter, the next gen boxes will let the world of java developers in – a far larger pool of potential app-makers than the EBIF standard can pull in.
With tru2way boxes, customers will be able to pull in dynamic content on multiple windows from their favourite web regions like Facebook, YouTube and any others and truly interact with their MSO and their friends.
However, said Steve Necessary, vice-president of video strategy and product management at MSO Cox Communications during a different session later on Monday, in the markets the company has deployed EBIF, iTV uptake has been strong and contributes to customer retention.
Seventy-one percent of Cox customers in the markets its offered (Northern Virginia, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and parts of Florida) use the simple iTV applications such as weather, caller ID, news, sports, e-mail and horoscopes. That’s more than the number of customers who access VOD, he said,
And scoff all you want at those last two. While weather is the top iTV app, horoscopes is the second most popular. And the number one iTV app in terms of page views? E-mail from the TV – despite the fact customers have to use their TV remote to compose and send them.
“All apps get used,” said Necessary. “And beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
So, while there remain obstacles blocking iTV deployment on a large scale, it seems American MSOs are really pushing the product this year but if there’s an “if only” heard among them, it goes like this: “If only we had the developer community building for us the same way they build for the iPhone.”
The industry is pushing for more openness, but the legacy proprietary gear just doesn’t lend itself to it. So, even though the Comcast Media Center has developed Hits Axis, creating an open environment with a developers kit there are just 30 apps from 23 developers being screened now, with just seven nearing deployment, said Gary Traver, SVP and COO of the CMC.
Apple’s App Store, by comparison, “stocks” over 85,000 apps, according to reports.
“We have to be in an open environment,” to make iTV succeed, said Traver. “We want independent developers to come into our platforms and provide apps we simply wouldn’t think about.”
And all that help just might help cable solve the iTV grail riddle.
Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien is in Denver covering the CTAM Summit and later this week, the Cable-Tec Expo.
