big teddy
  • Mar
    09
    Today I quit my job
    by mike at 9:52am

    The Shivers

    Oh dear effing jebus what have i done?

    That’s the question rolling around in my head like the ball on a roulette wheel.  I just quit a great, highly paid job at one of the largest companies in the US, in likely the worst economy of my life in order to start an application development company.  How did I get here?

    This whole plan was likely hatched about 5 years ago when I, like everyone else there, got laid off by TechTV when it got purchased by Comcast and glommed into G4.  At that point I was the Lead Engineer of the Interactive Television Group.   At TechTV the ITV Group’s job was to support affiliate sales by creating apps to support cable companies new interactive and on-demand initiatives.   We were a small group and when we got let go we had plans to start an Interactive Television start-up, but time passed, we never got traction and  Interactive Television never really took off so I took a job with a company called Metatv – which was shortly bought by Comcast and Cox and turned into TVWorks (The whole Comcast thing is a bit hinky – I’m not sure I’m ever going to escape them completely).

    The move to MetaTV/TVWorks/Comcast was likely a very fortuitous event.  At TVWorks we were building the infrastructure to support the ETV/EBIF spec (which started life as a Metatv spec) for Comcast and Cox.  There I led the Client Applications group building the first two generations of ETV applications for Comcast.  Here I became and expert at this platform and a believer in its abilities, I liked my job but about a year and a half ago I wasn’t quite loving it.  As Comcast’s corporate infrastructure began to work its way into TVWorks processes I started to get a bit of an itch that I wasn’t meant to be working directly for such a huge corporate entity.  As long as I was at TVWorks I’ve been doing an evening M.B.A at SF State. The impetus for this was that since my time at TechTV I thought I would be heading more towards a managerial/entrepreneurial career path, I figured an engineer with an M.B.A is a pretty good swiss army knife of an entrepenuer.   I mean here I was in the cradle of the internet civilization and had yet to work at a true startup.   I got completely hooked meanwhile on Hacker News and the Y combinator funding model and even submitted a couple of startup plans to their funding cycles. The thing with these plans weren’t that they were impossible – but I’m not sure I was committed to them.

    (more…)

  • Oct
    30
    The Future of TV Advertising.
    by mike at 3:40pm

    Currently, The Death of the 30 second spot.

    So way back in the day, Advertisers pretty much owned the TV airwaves,  the 1.0 version of TV Advertising had brands sponsoring and even producing and programming the shows that aired on the networks, the networks were essentially “dumb pipes” carrying the advertisers programming. Then  came the great Quiz show scandals of the late 50s which changed the arbiters of on-air programming from the advertisers into the hands of the networks themselves. Of course nothing in life is free, the networks needed to get paid and so was born the 30 second spot on TV – TV Advertising 2.0.

    And its been great right?  Outside of a slight bump wth the advent of the remote controI  (changing channels without getting up!  Argh!) and an initial fear of the VCR, this medium this had pretty much a 40 year run with no problem.  Advertisers would churn out these little spots, and the masses would sit on their couch and consume and all was well.

    But in the late 90s a company called Teleworld Inc. was formed and they created a new home media device called the “TiVO”.   This box had a strange history – it wasn’t understood by those who didn’t own one, and absolutely adored by anyone who did.  Suddenly more astute advertisers began to worry a bit about their precious television ad spend.  People with these new Digital Video Recorders (DVR – sometimes “Personal” Video Recorder) were able to record shows, play them back and skip the ads!   Heck future versions would even include the ability to skip in 30 second chunks to make it a bit easier.  Despite the popularity with their owners fortunately these devices have been fairly slow to catch on, but now,virtually every new set top box going out to consumers has a built in DVR – and these are getting out quick as more people want to take advantage of their shiny new HD TV.   Combine the growing uptake of DVRs, the new ruling on Network DVR’s and the rise of On Demand programming and you begin to get into areas where the 30 second spot starts to become severely threatened.  Yikes! What to do?  Where should advertisers send their dollars?

    The Addressable Ad, The Canoe And You.

    While the ad unit would stay the same, the effectiveness could be multiplied if, say, the ads you saw (or tried to skip through) were more tailored towards our tastes right?  Well in the U.S. this ability isn’t far off. Already many cable operators are looking at ways to implement addressable ads across their networks.   Technically its not terribly hard, the biggest issue is primarily a bandwidth concern – you have to pump multiple ad spots in the same broadcast bandwidth.   But this concern is being addressed as cable companies begin deployments of Switched Video.    Now all they need is to know what the Set Top Box’s users watch and suddenly you have a pretty good profile of which ads may be most effective BAM! Tailored TV Advertising.   The thing is though, to really get an effective ad buy across a single demographic you need to purchase spots across all the cable networks, this means you need some sort of cooperation between the cable networks.

    Getting all the cable companies’s paddling in the same direction is the goal of the Canoe Project.  The Canoe project is a cross cable company initiative that should allow advertisers to buy ads from multiple cable networks from a single point of contact.  (If you want I have a quick primer on Cable Advertising).   The Canoe project has a few goals but one  is to expand the reach of cable advertising.  Even without addressable ads the Canoe project will allow advertisers to get increased value by targetting ads by geographic demographic across the different cable comapnies.   Or in laymans terms they can say I want this Ford Flex ad to go to affulent urban areas and this Ford F150 ad to go to the hicks in the sticks.  With the increased targetting of ads the job of the media buyer is going to get a whole lot more complicated.  Something Google may be looking to address (Sheer speculation here – but I know they have some designs on STB software).   The Canoe project has two other goals however as well.    The first is to implement systems to deal with addressable ads.  The second is to make the ads enhanced.

    Enhanced Ads And The Forward Lean.

    One of the biggest drivers of ETV and interactive television in general is the ability to add value to the traditional 30 second spot by actively engaging the user – getting them leaning forward from the couch and making a traditionally passive experience into something more engaging.  While the possibilities will become vast there are a couple of primary types of enhanced ads that are being pushed by CableLabs and Canoe.

    Request For Information (RFI)

    RFI ads are one of the more ubiquitous forms of enhanced advertising.  It allows the user to request additional materials to be mailed or emailed to the user.  Some of the cooler more advanced versions can also tie into a Digital Voice offering or something like Jajah to set up a call with a customer service rep.

    Telescoping Ads

    Telescoping here means ads that take you away from your linear programming (telescoping into the content).   There are essentially two flavors here, the first type simply telescopes into a VOD offering.   In this scenario the viewer can be watching an ad for the new Batman movie and then choose to view the trailer on demand.   The more advanced version would telescope into a more robust interactive offering (sometimes called a “microsite”) which in some cases may just be an enhanced VOD stream.   This way the user could click into a microsite for Dominos an instantly be able to order a pizza, or into a CBS branded space with links to VOD previews of other shows. The hardest part of enhancing ads is adding interactivity to a 30 second window in time, which is why telescoping units are the most attractive.

    The Future or “How can I buy Lauren’s cute shirt?”

    While enhancing and addressing ads can both make them more relevant and more engaging,  neither directly address ad skipping.  The real solution to this will end up being some form of in show advertising.   The next generation is already becoming the age of multitaskers, and they’re going to want more and more out of their television experience.   Adding an interactive layer is really the next innovation that will happen to television shows, enhanced overlays and telescoping will really add new ways for advertisers to attract users from within the shows themselves – timeshifting be damned!  Even with relatively basic interactivity this kind of in-show interaction can add new methods for increasing brand reach.   This could be enhaced by tieing the interactivity directly to the show content as well.  Imagine a popup during “The Hills” that says “want to know what Lauren got her shirt?  Click Here”.  This could lead to an advertising spot or even the ability to purchase the product directly.

    Similarly shows like Heros and Sweden’s The Truth About Marika, are turning regular television viewing into an immersive interactive experience.   For those who wish, they provide the opportunity for users to actually interact with the show on the web – with additional content and plot development going on outside of the normal television confines.  The Truth About Marika even took this a step further by creating an entire alternate reality game where users could actually get up and out and experience the content outside in the real world.   These types of fully interactive experiences are most likely the future of all types of content, and advertising in this new immersive medium will span interactive applications and viral media to a wholly ground up interactive experience – ads included.

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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.