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  • Aug
    06
    The State Of The ITV Onion
    by mike at 8:20am

    Let’s make something clear, I’m not a pundit, nor an analyst or an interactive television marketer. I’m an engineer with an MBA, so I’m not entirely sure what that makes me. Specifically though I’m an engineer with experience building interactive television applications. The type those across the pond call “Red Button” interactivity. Apps where the user interacts with applications on the Set Top Box (or with the advent of the Cable Card and tru2way/OCAP the TV itself). This means non interactive VOD or DVR type functionality isn’t really what I’m looking for. Its a fuzzy line but that’s the way I’m going to go.

    So for the next couple of weeks I’m going to try to capture what’s going on with the top 5 cable companies in the US. In order of Market Share:

    2. Comcast
    3. Time Warner
    4. Cox
    5. Charter
    6. Cablevision

    The cool thing is that I’ve gotten true ITV apps deployed on 4 of these systems at some point (missing TW), and my current employer (well technically I’m a Comcast employee - but I work for the organization called TVWorks) is the technology provider for Cox and Comcast so I have some pretty good insight.

    From a technology angle I’ll go into these with a bit more details for the MSOs that have something unique going on but primarily there are two industry standards that are key to this field. For the uninitiated, cable industry technology standards are more or less defined by CableLabs a cable industry consortium put together to create standards to make life easier on hardware manufacturers.

    ETV/EBIF (kind of crappy article but I’m suprised anything is up on wikipedia) Probably the first widespread enhanced TV technology that will get cross MSO deployment and support. EBIF is currently pretty rudimentary in what it can do but it has enough functionality to bridge the gap from the crappy circa 1995 set-top-boxes still in wide deployment until widespread deployment of advanced set-top-boxes. Its a bit unclear whether this technology has enough legs to have a long future on the set top once tru2way gets real traction.

    tru2way (OCAP). The holy grail for too long, tru2way (used to be called OCAP) is a Java stack meant for set-top-boxes. Most ASTB’s applications will be running on a full tru2way stack in the near future.

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