So in one fist I have A Different Engine my new Interactive Television application development company.   This is my bread and butter, but its a new services company with few clients right now so I might have some down time – and idle hands are the devil’s playground.  So I have two other ideas for more traditional intenet startups both these apps have working prototypes and one has been soft launched even (with no traffic .

My goal is to really get a couple of teams up and running and then just provide whatever guidance I can.

The Ground Rules

Note I’m stealing a bunch of these from PG and at least one from Mark Cuban.

• The Goal is to build successful businesses NOT an exit.   There is the possibility of taking some intial funding and maybe down the road some sort of exit event, but that’s not the goal – that’s the journey.   This goal is to build a business that keeps a small, competent team paid and happy to come to work every day.  Get revenues, then profitability and grow organically.
• Get Ramen Profitable.  If you haven’t ready Paul Graham’s 13 rules for startups do so now.
• Start with 5 people per team.
• Take no more than $100,000 in seed funding – if any.  You may ask “why take any?”  The answer is that funding allows you to get through some rough spots starting up.  Infrastructure is expensive and credit cards suck.  Now this may end up being only $5-25K for some servers but that’s fine.  The second thing some investment brings is exposure to that investor’s network.  Ask most what the most valuable thing they got from the Ycombinator program was and its likely going to be “Investor Day” when they get introduced to the founders network of potential investors and possible acquisition partners.  You may ask “why take so little?”  the issue here is that taking significant VC capital comes with a whole  world of expectations,  and requirements that I think are too high.   At the end of the day though this will be your product.  Make the decision that you think makes sense.
• Everyone works on the product.  You’re either building the app, keeping it up or maintaining its content.  If you’re not doing something that affects what users see then you’re not that useful.  The Managment structure is pretty much flat.
• Work agile – ideally on monthly iterations.  If you’re not familiar with the agile process yet, get there, its pretty straightforward and places a heavy emphasis on getting the product out.  Both these projects fit this model well.   And note I’m not an agile nazi, far from it, but I think working off a prioritized product backlog and getting release quality code out each month is a great way to work.
• You can live anywhere.

Equity.

Note there may be no way this concept could work, but I haven’t thought of why not yet.

So the way I see it I’d hope to take a small bit of equity, since I have a lot of early work done – this will be negotiated with the team but maybe 5%?  Then I was thinking on the most equitable way to distribute equity when teams may be in flux and the only thing you’re working for is equity.

What I was thinking that for the first few months or years – until staff starts getting paid, that equity would be based on full months worked.

The concept I have in my head is that at the end of every calendar month, everyone who worked the entire month gets one share of equity.  So say 5 team members start on May 1st, on May 30th everyone gets a single share out of a total of 5. End of second month everyone gets one more share but the   pie is out of 10.   If at the end of the second month someone leaves they walk with their two shares, if someone new comes on they, like everyone else gets a share at the end of the month and the pool again grows by 5.

The thing is that while shares get diluted each month, the initial founders would still hold the same 20% as long as they stay with the company (though this could dilute with any investment)

Anyone have a better way?  I’m not sure how to handle asking someone to leave (a firing) yet, but that would need to get worked out.

The Apps

wesayitiz.com

The Team Needed

• 2 Ruby on Rails developers
• 1 designer
• 2 Content Editors and Product Managers.

The Concept

Alright the name sucks, it came from “Its news because we say it is”.  The basic idea is that as successful digg, reddit and fark are I think there is still a space for a real meta news site. The idea is that news stories either come from users, or the content editors browsing the web and finding the best and most current stories.  The more I hear about digg or reddit or even hacker news being gamed to get on the front page the more I feel that a site that’s maintained by a few plugged in individuals may be the way to go.  While the community thing works, I think each of these sites skew a particular way, and I still end up at sfgate or nytimes for my “real” daily news.   Why not focus on the news and manage the content that way?

Once stories are approved for the front page, the stories are ranked on the page by clicks.  More clicks, the higher on the page.  This is my user generated bit but could be removed.

I’d love to see this site end up a bit like the NYTimes site, except the content is all externally linked.

One thing I was going to do that was relatively unique was to be as public and transparent as possible with this site.   Why not let users know what kind of traffic its getting and the revenue being generated.  This whole thing is a bit of an experiment why not make it public?  More details on that

Current Status

The site is up, user authentication and it’s got an adminitrative interface, and even harvests RSS feeds in order to jumpstart finding content.   An Adsense account is already in place for revenue and there’s a comment system.   It could use a sharper design and once it gains traction I think you’re going to break out the content categories (content is categorized but there’s no display function behind it yet).   It still needs some QA and my test coverage is pretty sparse, I’d recommend the first thing done.

Also its hosted on a slicehost chunk that it will likely need to move off of ASAP.

HeyThere

The Team Needed

• 1-2 mobile application developers (got to be multi talented, iPhone and Android are the initial client platforms).
• 2 Backend Apps developers – Java and Rails
• 1 designer
• 1 Product Manager

The Concept

HeyThere is not as developed as wesayitiz but it may have longer legs.   HeyThere is a location based messaging app, kind of like Loopt’s little brother. If I’m at a bar (back in my single days) and saw a cute girl at the end of the bar and wanted to find out who she is, how could i do this?

HeyThere is essentially a hybrid IM and Chat client that broadcasts messages to the 20 other users closest to you.  No mapping or tracking, just broadcast chat/IM based on proximity – there are similar services that do this via a bluetooth broadcast mechanism.  There isn’t yet a revenue stream – but it couldn’t be hard, allow local vendors to send an occasional message for a fee and you’ve got something.

Current Status

The app is based on XMPP/Jabber and its been a while since I tabled this one so it may take some jumping from some hoops to get these running.

I have 2 client prototypes in some kind of working state, the first runs on flash (the user inputs location) the second works on Android with GPS enabled.

I have a backend working that is a plugin for the Openfire Jabber server which is Java based – I’ve also patched that server with something so I have a version of it in the repo (at this moment in time I can’t remember why).   I also have a few hacks in there that allows you to use any Jabber client for testing – you send location in text to a bot instead of using a built in GPS mechanism.   Scaling this piece may be a difficult task, I played with some caching mechanisms but they’re really hacked together. You may want to take a look at porting this work over to ejabberd.  Its Erlang based so its not as easy to find competent devs for this but it may scale better. Openfire can be clustered however so maybe just stick with that.
All code is in a subversion repo and I can give access if you’re interested.

This one is a bit of a beast to get running but I’d work with anyone interested on the different issues around it.

The Rest

So that’s it really,  two apps with working prototypes looking for the team that can take them to the next level.  They’re likely not commented enough but hey I’m here to answer questions.

Think you have what it takes?  Then email me at recovery@bitdamaged.com

Any questions or comments, then leave them underneath!

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.

So what to do?

Leap and the net will appear

So at some point mid-last year I figured I should go back to what I know best and that’s interactive television. So what exactly do I do?  The space is starting to settle technically, on EBIF and tru2way as the dominant technologies on the set-top.   There are still a few holes in the ETV technology chain that could be filled with the proper product offering so the first thought I had was to create a product company.  The upside of creating a product company in this space is that generally your “exit” can be bigger and its easier and generally these types of companies generally have revenue projections that are more attractive to venture capital investors.  There are a few problems however, first I don’t really want to be in infrastructure development, its not my domain experience and passion.  If I’m going to do this then I damn well was going to do something that I’m good at and love doing.  Its not just a passion and experience issue.  Second, developing and selling a product means building a significant business structure in order to support it.  You need some form of venture capital, time and committed partners in order to get this type of business running.   All three of these resources are hard to come by in the current economy and/or with a full time job.   Finally you lose a large chunk of equity and control.  The equity I’m okay with, the control not so much.  Its not that I’m a megalomaniac micromanager, in fact quite the opposite,  the issue I have with taking large chunks of venture capital is that you are now creating an organization that must be very significantly focused on creating value for the shareholders.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

But I’m not sure that’s the kind of corporate culture I want to create.  Maybe the business should focus on creating value for the people that work there?  I’d prefer something more intimate, a small dedicated team – with a heavy emphasis on their craft.

Maybe I’m wearing rose colored glasses.

So lets see I want to stay in interactive TV, I don’t want to do an infrastructure product and I’m hesitant to try to go after venture capital. This leaves two choices. The first would be an interactive TV application, or an application development services company.

A services company has its downsides. Its a permanent hustle for new work, you can’t escape having people out there constantly selling and drumming up new work. It also tends to place more pressure on the services team when there is always an 800 pound gorilla of a client who wants everything better, faster and cheaper. But there are several upsides for starting an ITV development company right now.

First as bad as the economy is, this year interactive television is becoming a reality.  The technology is being deployed on a bunch of cable operators.  EBIF in particular is a large driving force behind this, and it just so happens (wait… I’m trying to pat myself on the back here) I’m one of the foremost experts in developing apps for this platform.

Second in down economies some companies are more apt to outsource development services – especially in an area where they are not going to have in house experience.

Third is that this still leaves the door wide open to developing products in the future.  If you take the history of the web, many large application companies spun out of web properties creating tools that they needed and then productizing these tools for others.  Because the ITV field is so nascent I think there is going be a similar arc.

I guess there it is.  A ITV application development company and service provider that will (hopefully) spin off some products.

Introducing

A Different Engine

So this is the reason I left my job today.  A Different Engine aims to be an interactive television development company.   In the short term we will focus on consulting and EBIF application development. Longer term is really hard to map out right now.  The whole television landscape is going through a huge seachange right now in how television content is delivered and monetized.  I’m not sure how its going to shake out entirely but I can pretty much guarantee you this – there will be interactivity involved and we’ll be there to make it happen.

Behind every great (or halfway decent) man…..

One of the biggest reasons I can do this now is because I have the support of my wife and family.  April I couldn’t do this without you, you’re my rudder.  Thank you sweetie – I love you!

Messing around on my Mac laptop I ran

gem update

This ended up killing about 3 hours of my night and 20 minutes this morning when I finally figured out what happened.

The symptom was that I kept loading my main page and getting an error that my ApplicationController was missing.

uninitialized constant ApplicationController

This was strange because I still had my application.rb file, I could include the file in my controllers with “require application.rb” and get things to work, but this obviously wasn’t right.

I correctly thought I’d somehow hosed my gems which I spent about 2 hours mucking with last night. I realized I had Rails 2.3.0 which was new but couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on. Finally this morning I created a new rails skeleton to see if that would run out of the box. On doing so I realized that “application.rb” was now “application_controller.rb” in the skeleton app. A sensible change, but that meant I needed to rename my application.rb file to application_controller.rb. to get my rails app to work.

doh!

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.

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.

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).

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.