iTV endgame—August 2002
By Duffy Hayes, Senior Editor
With MSOs focused on delivering efficient high-speed data services, and readying their networks for the inevitable monster of video-on-demand, the market for interactive television services looks as if it’s been lost in the shuffle...again.
It’s not a question of familiarity, by any means. Applications that allow viewers to play along with a game show, or order pizza with their remote control, or check the balance of their savings account, or hyperlink to a Web site for added program details, are certainly available and ready for deployment today. iTV developers have been showing these off at industry trade shows for years.
But undeniable momentum or actual deployments have been hard to come by. MSOs haven’t bought in to the idea that they can make mountains of new dough by skimming two percent off Domino’s Pizza purchases by their subscribers. The iTV business model hasn’t sufficiently been proven; having set-top boxes in the field with limited processing power hasn’t helped the cause much either.
In times like these, it’s said that misery loves company.
Today, players in the iTV game are taking a hard look at the process of how interactive applications get from the drawing board to subscribers’ TV screens, and they’re finding a fractious, multi-platform development environment, marked more by proprietary technology rather than common application platforms.
The iTV industry is hoping to remedy the situation through standardization and additional strength in numbers. New initiatives in interactive content production are adding to the ongoing efforts to standardize hardware and middleware and are becoming forums of shared technologies and intellectual property. But whether a common application platform can become the catalyst for real iTV growth is a question the market will have to answer.
To date, however, it hasn’t happened. That’s in spite of the efforts by CableLabs to specify middleware under its OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) effort, which adopted many of the guidelines established by the European MHP standardization group. CableLabs recently published its OCAP 2.0 specification, which addresses execution and presentation platforms on set-top boxes, but the iTV industry hasn’t exactly gravitated to the specification en masse.
“(Middleware vendors) like Liberate, OpenTV and Canal+ have selectively adopted standards that they feel comfortable with, that they feel are going to predominate,” explains Bob Harrison, a solutions architect with Spyglass Integration, whose integration lab is the melting pot in which many of these disparate platforms undergo interoperability testing. “However, what they’re really not doing is saying there’s a common platform that exists across all of the vendor spaces,” Harrison adds.
And therein lies the problem, according to many developers. Today, VOD vendors, t-commerce vendors or interactive game developers can architect an application that works similarly from platform to platform. Overall design is essentially the same. Many of the interactive elements can be retained from design to design, but when it gets down to execution on proprietary middleware or set-top platforms, developers are forced into a cycle of form-fitting their creations to work in specific environments.
“What we’re seeing is basically an 80-20 rule–where 80 percent of the service architecture, design and concept is preserved as you go from platform to platform,” Harrison says. “But there is this 20 percent factor, which says I need to make it run on Liberate, or OpenTV, or whatever.”
GoldPocket Interactive is one interactive production company feeling the pain of having to write multiple versions of interactive content for multiple platforms. As a developer, it’s seen that “20 percent” Harrison describes up close.
New programming from the Game Show Network, including Russian Roulette and Friend or Foe, includes interactive play-at-home capabilities, for either set-top or
PC interactive platforms. iTV programming
for each show is enabled by GoldPocket EventMatrix technology. The Game Show Network now boasts a total of 35 hours of weekly interactive television programming, much of it powered by GoldPocket proprietary technology.
“We felt an increasing frustration of driving content for a whole bunch of different platforms,” says Martijn Lopes Cardozo, vice president of product management with GoldPocket. “From a content perspective, each platform has its own characteristics.”
So, back in March, GoldPocket decided to do something about it. In talking with companies across the interactive value chain–from hardware, to middleware, to application development, to networks and broadcasters–it was hearing a similar refrain: that iTV growth has been hampered by a lack of standardization in the content production process.
Out of those discussions came the iTV Production Standards Initiative, with GoldPocket’s Lopes Cardozo serving as chair. The main thrust of the group is to create a unified specification for the production of interactive content, specifically defining naming conventions for all of the metadata sent along with MPEG video. Interactive metadata is added to traditionally produced video to create iTV applications. Essentially, embedded within interactive content are certain “tags” and “markers” which are the nuts and bolts that make up interactive elements like poll questions, hyperlinks or game properties.
The group, which many have taken to calling the GoldPocket Initiative, felt it was important to deliver an initial specification as quickly as possible, as a way to get the ball rolling and come up with an industry consensus along a faster timeline. The group’s 1.0 specification is a subtle re-working of GoldPocket’s proprietary “schemas.” In essence, it is GoldPocket’s system of encoding XML-based metadata repackaged as an industry standard.
To get a spec to market right away, the group “decided to basically open up the way we have produced interactive events, and give away part of our intellectual property in order to drive the iTV industry forward, and make it easier for other people to use the same common language,” Cardozo explains. It is a calculated risk on GoldPocket’s part to share its proprietary nomenclature, which today accounts for about 75 percent of the metadata encoding market, “but the way to grow the industry from here is to allow other networks, and even competitors, to use it,” Cardozo predicts.
So far, the group has been steadily creating an organizational structure, with more than 450 companies signing up in support. Member companies represent each stage in the interactive content production process, as the method by which metadata gets added to television content differs from application to application. Be it in script writing, post-production, or networks and programming, the iTV Production Standards Initiative has members in each of the stages of interactive content production working through the specification process.
Right now, the body’s Working Group has a goal of releasing the 2.0 specification by September, and it’s been hard at work revising the 1.0 spec to include input from all of the member companies. Between now and then, other factions of the initiative are working to promote adoption through specific case studies in an effort to prove viability to operators reticent to take the iTV plunge.
More than a one-horse town
Interestingly, another group within iTV is working to standardize iTV content production, albeit in a more specific, targeted area. This concurrent effort, called the TVXML Forum, also aims to unify part of the content production process around the XML tagging scheme.
However, this group has a laser focus on potential iTV messaging applications, and its objective is to unify communication protocols between the television, mobile phone and home PC platforms. Its Holy Grail is to create an environment that fosters the development of unified messaging applications that run on set-top platforms, but incorporates all of the different ways in which people communicate today.
Like GoldPocket, the TVXML Forum is being driven mainly by a single company, with proprietary technology it thinks can be adopted industry-wide. TVGate, the iTV messaging division of software provider Comverse Technologies, is behind the TVXML effort, and has seen first-hand how difficult it is to design communications applications across multiple middleware and hardware platforms.
“TVXML assumes existing middleware and set-top boxes will remain relevant for the next few years. The standard is orthogonal to existing standards like MHP and OCAP, and the communications infrastructure that TVXML provides sits on top of the middleware,” says Ezra Mizrahi, a vice president of product management and strategic marketing with Comverse-TVGate. “It actually creates new opportunities by opening existing infrastructure to interactive applications, regardless of middleware or set-top box. It will ease the integration of communications applications and will reduce the integration process with varying operator environments.”
If his group can gain industry traction and acceptance, a spate of new interactive messaging applications might find their way onto cable systems. It could foster the convergence of the TV, the phone and the PC. Possibilities include having applications like chat or instant messaging on your TV screen, telephony via TV, caller ID information displayed on-screen, Yellow Pages listings on-screen, etc.
To get there, TVXML will have to adopt iTV schemas specific to the messaging environment, and then translate that into television presentation. Initial TVXML standards define a client-server paradigm. The schemas specify how to run iTV messaging applications, either from a set-top box or from an application server. So far, the group has developed three specific TVXML schemas for adoption: one defining messaging data and an associated set of APIs; one defining billing parameters; and a third schema dedicated to provisioning.
Unlike the GoldPocket group, TVXML didn’t develop an initial specification for the industry to chew on. The group launched formally at the National Cable Show in New Orleans in May, but it’s aiming to announce a formal working group that will develop an initial specification at the IBC Show in September. The group hopes to have a spec submitted by 2003.
Spyglass architect Harrison thinks TVXML is off to a good start. “I think there’s a lot of promise there. I think they’ll get some traction,” he says. If he’s right, the television screen may just become the center of a unified messaging world, and consumers might be enticed to spend another $5 to $7 a month.
Compounding the problem of a fractious iTV industry is the lack of any unified industry association, or influential body governing the future direction of interactive television services. Within related industry associations, there are factions and committees dedicated to the advancement of the interactive community, but each usually represents just a solitary piece of the iTV value chain.
For example, there is a group within NAB, but it is focused, obviously, on the broadcaster and network perspective of iTV. NCTA’s group reflects the MSO and a few vendors’ points of view. The advertising community has looked at ways to leverage interactive services through the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). But all this simply contributes to the fractiousness.
So, in an effort to fulfill a perceived need for some sort of unified forum, a select group of iTV veterans decided an iTV industry forum was overdue. Composed of leaders from companies like Wink, Liberate, WorldGate, OpenTV and others, the group set out back in July to establish what is now called the Interactive Television (or iTV) Alliance, with the stated goal of providing a unified voice over the future of interactive television.
One of the first jobs the new group took on was to define and include each market with a potential stake in the growth of interactive television. It began by defining seven areas: content, distribution, advertising, applications, hardware, data/commerce and production.
“This was a way to get everybody who’s dealing with interactive television to be agnostically pushing in the same direction,” explains Ben Mendelson, one of the founders and current president of the iTV Alliance.
The group held its first informal meeting in May at the National Cable Show in New Orleans, and today counts about 200 companies or individuals committed to the effort. So far, only the body’s co-chairmen have been named to leadership positions for the organization, with Art Cohen of ACTV and Ken Papagan of Delmar Media.NET named to initially lead the group. The group hopes to hold an official meeting by the end of the year.
But, don’t look for this new industry alliance to play a prominent role in furthering any of the important standardization efforts described heretofore. According to Mendelson, the group will initially focus on generating consumer interest for interactive services, and won’t play an active role in the assuredly sticky process of defining, drafting and driving industry content production standards.
“Standards discussions are difficult in any industry. If you start focusing on them with an industry-wide group like this, a lot of your time and energy will go to just standards,” Mendelson says. “We don’t want to do that. We want to talk about all of the big issues about how to promote interactive television. We want to get people excited so that network operators can feel comfortable that they’ll make enough money from iTV to deploy the technology.”
In that vein, the group will focus on developing three key initiatives over the near term. First, the group will be working to develop a comprehensive consumer outreach campaign, which will include production of an infomercial touting the capabilities of today’s iTV applications. Second, it’ll work to create a virtual Enhanced Advertising Lab, which will be a forum for large national advertisers to interact with iTV vendors to come up with creative ways of incorporating advertising in future iTV applications. And lastly, the group will work to define “two-screen” interactive applications (ones that combine television and Internet technologies) through an Extended Television Initiative.
Whether these and other industry efforts surrounding iTV can make a dent in the consciousness of operators–currently preoccupied with video-on-demand, high-speed data, and even telephony–remains to be seen.
Will streamlining the interactive content production process make more iTV content available? Probably. In their effort to reduce churn and differentiate from satellite competitors, will cable operators ditch VOD and HSD in favor of interactive TV? —ID
