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  • Aug
    19
    State Of The ITV Onion: Comcast
    by mike at 8:50am

    With the acquisition of MetaTV and Liberate’s North American assets and the resulting creation of TVWorks Comcast became signifcantly invested in both ETV and tru2way and these two platforms are becoming technology cornerstones of Comcast’s interactive television strategy.

    Like everyone else in the industry Comcast is going to try like heck to quickly phase out the DCT 2000 series boxes that have been an albatross around ITV’s neck for the last several years and be able to move to a  full Java stack for all the software on the set top box.   Ideally this means that the guide, VOD clients and interactive clients will all be running on a tru2way platform, though at least for the near future there will be enough mid-level set tops out there that will have to run a reduced (can anyone say OnRamp to OCAP?) Java stack.  Comcast will be running the TVWorks ETV Client for bound and unbound ITV Applications both native and on Java STBs.

    Of course Comcast isn’t just an 10 million pound silverback in the cable industry, they’re both a content provider (E!, G4, Style …)  and an industry services provider with the Comcast Media Center. Comcast’s CMC is offering enhanced TV services for content providers who use their “Headend In The Sky” (HITS) distribution service which means Comcast can and will be driving ETV adoption by some of the smaller local MSO’s who use Comcast’s distribution systems.

    Short term its pretty clear that Comcast will prefer to push ETV applications out to consumers over full tru2way applications.  They still have a large chunk of users using older DCT2000 and DCT2500 class boxes that just can’t handle a full tru2way stack and OnRamp is pretty much a nightmare of a band aid - won’t work on DCT 2000s and the implementations are sketchy at best.   ETV will help drive their interactive reach over the coffee table to their couch based users while they wait for box churn to get newer, higher powered, and preferreably DOCSIS enabled, set top boxes.  They’ll probably have a CID app out to consumers pretty soon in order to push their triple play as well as a suite of enhanced ads to add another paddle to the Canoe initiative.  These types of apps work fine on ETV and drive revenues - tip of the sword etv applications getting interactivity out to the masses.

    Long term strategy for Comcast will probably be a mixed platform play as they try to unify all of their interactive offerings.   You can look at their recent acquisitions of StreamSage, Plaxo (in particular Plaxo’s facebook clone “Pulse” and thePlatform and you begin to see the outline of a huge cross platform integration of video, contacts and content that has the potential to be very compelling.   It also has the potential to be a flying spaghetti monster nightmare of a user experience unless its really carefully managed with a consistent vision - something even traditional software companies of Comcast’s size have been really poor at (I’m looking at you Google and Microsoft).

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