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  • Aug
    28
    State of The ITV Onion: Time Warner
    by mike at 11:37am

    Sub Title: The Navic Dilemma

    Honestly this should be one of the last of these that I do just because I really have always been a bit insulated from what Time Warner is up to, but I’ve harnessed my Google-Fu with a little bit of knowledge to try to discern Time Warner’s history and future in the ITV space.

    Navic

    One of the reasons I have little insight into Time Warner is because it seems like most of their interactive offerings have been on Navic’s platform - one I’ve never really been exposed to.  Navic is an enigma not just because of my lack of familiarity but I’m not sure where they’re going to end up as thing start to shake out.  From my experience it looks Navic has been MetaTV/TVWorks/Liberate and OpenTV’s primary competition in the past.  They’ve deployed on Bright House’s network as well as various Time Warner systems, most likely running on older Java Stacks on Scientific Atlanta boxes,  this means they’re probably currently busily porting everything to tru2way and OnRamp.   In the past Navic’s MO seems to really be as an application development services group who once they’ve built something do what all service providers like to do and “productize” their offering.  In other words “hey we built a walled garden on spec for client A, now lets repackage it as a ‘product’ and hope to suck in clients B & C”.    This isn’t a bad model, generally the back end application services layer is the heavier engineering chore, so just reuse an existing back end and port the front end to whatever the relevant technology is.  That way you have a shrink wrapped package for selling but a heavy custom component to increase the implementation costs.   It looks like this has been a fairly successful model for Navic as they’ve continued to be a functioning company in a space that traditionally been extremely brutal to play in.

    Most recently Navic has begun to refine its offerings and focus on their advertising related products, so much so that they recently were acquired by Microsoft in a bidding war with the other Canoe participants.   Undoubtedly Microsoft decided to go the acquisition route as a hedge against whatever Google is doing in the space. This is honestly probably the best thing to happen to the investors in Navic but may ultimately be harmful to Navic as a company.   The thing is that Microsoft has poured millions of dollars since 1995 into the U.S. interactive television space with little success.  Most recently they’ve been able to dust things off a bit and reposition themselves to the IPTV players as an off-the-shelf solution but still they’ve had a terrible time cracking the traditional cable over coax market.   I think its fairly safe to say that their issues have never been technological - instead Microsoft has always tried to create an offering that would lock MSO’s into a long term contract and force them to buy Microsoft systems and tools for the entire plant.   This doesn’t tend to sit well with the MSOs who are the master’s of their own domain - they’re not going to cede to Microsoft that kind of level of control even if TWC and Comcast have flirted with Microsoft in the past. If you look at the big MSO’s history in the space its pretty evident that they would rather let smaller players such as Navic take all the upfront risk and R&D work and then move to acquire them when their technology shows promise. Another significant issue with Navic’s ITV platform is that its proprietary.  Its not tru2way or ETV so without that it doesn’t have a lot of value to broadcasters and advertisers looking to create bound applications.  (Note: Its important to distinguish between Navic’s ITV platform and their Hypercast Ad trafficing platform which  likely will be standards compliant). So while much of what Time Warner has done in the past has been on Navic’s ITV platform, I question whether this relationship will continue much moving forward.

    TWC - ETV and Java

    So 70% of Time Warner’s footprint is Scientific Atlanta which makes developers leap for joy since this means they don’t have to deal with the Moto DCT2K.  Instead most of the time you’re talking about some sort of limited Java stack that may or may not be called “OnRamp” which is really much more a transitionary ideal then a real product. Time Warner has already demo’d an ETV Client for SA at a CableLabs interop and is a major player in the Canoe initiative which would lead one to believe that ETV is going to most likely start seeing the light of day with their subs sometime in the near future. Honestly TWC may be figuring out what some of the other MSOs are which is if ETV is “enough” on lower end boxes and tru2way is well defined and full featured on high end - what’s the need for a hinky OnRamp implmentation in the middle?  Just extend ETV onto the mid-level boxes and don’t even try to jump through the hoops getting OnRamp to work. Brilliant!

    So if you’re playing along at home this means  the two biggest MSOs (TWC and Comcast) are going to be ETV enabled in the next year or two.  What?  A cross MSO interactive television standard?!? Crazy talk!  So while we’ll see what Navic’s role will be moving forward, But right now it looks like ETV will be a short term solution then from there TW (like pretty much everyone else) will be focusing on Java enabled set top boxes  with tru2way moving forward.

    UPDATE (2x)!

    10/28/08

    Time Warner has inked a deal to deploy BIAP’s ETV user agent!

    10/08/08

    Man sometimes you can’t see everything.   On Oct 8th (’08) TW has announced that they’re running a test deployment of ActiveVideo (formerly ICTV)’s system.  ActiveVideo is an interesting system which, much like WorldGate before it, which try’s to bridge the web with interactive television.   I have to plead some ignorance here since I haven’t paid much (apparently enough at all) to what ICTV has been up to.   I need to find out more - though I have to admit I’m not fond of yet another non-standardized middleware solution.  The “web on TV” bit sounds more like marketing collateral than anything else.

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