Comcast OPTV litigation deadline November 30th?
Comcast, Cox Set Stage for ITV Innovations on Mass Scale
Comcast and Cox Communications have found a way to facilitate rapid in-house and third-party development of interactive TV applications development across millions of legacy set-top boxes.
Through their joint ITV platform venture, TVWorks, and an agreement with Ensequence, supplier of authoring tools for enhanced TV (ETV) applications, the MSOs say they are putting in place a non-technical set of developer tools and application runtime software that will lead to launch of many new service components on installed digital set-tops starting in mid 2007. The combination of TVWorks software, which the MSOs have evolved from the Liberate ITV system they purchased for use in North America two years ago, and the on-Q ETV authoring suite from Ensequence is now ready for use by programming networks, advertisers and cable operators, officials say.
Applications will run on the TVWorks implementation of the CableLabs’ ETV-BIF (Enhanced Television – Binary Interchange Format) standard, which is specifically designed to support the North American cable industry’s most widely deployed, first-generation digital TV set-tops: the Motorola DCT-2000 and Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 2000. The MSOs’ investment in the ETV technologies suggests the U.S. cable industry is anxious to provide subscribers with TV services that incorporate the kinds of interactive participation and immersion they are beginning to taste on the Web.
The ETV-BIF standard will enable the MSOs to get to a mass audience fast with rudimentary interactive services over old and new set-tops within the next year. That effort will help fill what may be a five-year wait for the rich interactive applications envisioned for set-tops and consumer electronics products running CableLabs’ more futuristic Open Cable Applications Platform (OCAP) standard.
“ETV is really focused on applications that are delivered in, and relate to, a video program,” says Greg Thomson, senior vice president, product management and business development, for TVWorks.“There’s a lot you can do with functionality, such as voting and polling and data updates, posting recommendations and highly synchronous play-along applications. We feel it covers 80 percent of application needs for ITV.”
Thomson adds that “ETV is in testing and progressing very well. Trials will be starting soon.”
He suggests the “first wave of applications may be very simple. If you’re watching American Idol, you can participate in the program by picking a winner that week from a selection of four or six names by using up, down and select on the remote control. You can also do things like read and delete email on the TV between innings or check caller ID on TV. Or a network can introduce a VOD offering—watch outtakes, preview of next week’s show—during end credits. These are applications that are complex on the backend, but simple from the user experience point of view. Later you might get more complicated with contests and posting results.”
In addition to meeting interactive video competition from the Web, ETV promises to make money. Such services offered by satellite and cable TV services in Europe generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2005, according to the French Professional Association for Interactive Television.
U.S. MSOs can rapidly start to replicate that success by enabling 90 percent of their installed base of digital TV set-tops to run ETV-BIF applications by the end of 2007 or early 2008, adding up to an addressable market between 25 million and 30 million set-tops,says Aslam Khader, vice president, marketing and strategy, for Ensequence, whose tools are widely used by European programmers and operators including BSkyB.
At that point, Khader says, the MSOs will be able to attract advertisers to support a free, ad-supported ETV model for a mass audience.
“Most likely, as we see in the U.K., interactivity will get sponsored and funded by advertisers,” he says. “The advertisers get tracking and reporting—the best of Internet—plus a mass audience and addressibilty—the best of television. Based on our discussions across the programmer, advertiser and operator communities, when interactivity can reach 20 million, that’s not a little experiment.
Khader adds: “We see that as a tipping point for this industry, when the ad community sits up and is willing to invest significantly. We already have 11 to 12 million [addressable devices] on (EchoStar’s) DISH. In nine to 12 months, middle or late 2007, we will cross 20 million in the U.S. with satellite and cable combined.”
Comcast and Cox selected the TVWorks platform as their interactive application platform on Motorola and S-A set-top boxes, which are already in more than 13 million of those two operators’ customer homes. Other North American MSOs account for about that many DCT and Explorer set-tops again. Cox directly licensed Ensequence tools last January. Now Comcast gains access to them through TVWorks, which itself operates an application development division formerly known as MetaTV.
While both TVWorks and Ensequence provide OCAP-compliant solutions, that more robust runtime environment will require more processing power and memory than is available on the older boxes.
“The good news is we now have a more standards-based environment for development and deployment, whether for OCAP or Java or ETV,” Thomson says. “Creators can now develop in a user-friendly language and see their applications delivered over wide array of set-tops.”
