big teddy
  • 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
    25
    ITV Widget Engine
    by mike at 2:08pm

    There’s been a lot of times where I wish developing ETV applciations was as easy as developing apps for the Yahoo Widget engine (or “Konfabulator” as it used to be called).   It’s pretty straightforward, uses XML for visual layouts and Javascript for scripting behavior.   Nice, neat little package and a paradigm that you can start to see in a lot of browser based technologies (Flash, and Firefox plugins come to mind).  Now it looks like this is coming to pass as Yahoo and Intel have announced they’re bringing the “Widget Channel” to TV’s over tru2way.  Even Comcast has pledged support.

    Widget Channel Image

    Widget Channel Image

  • 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.

  • Aug
    01
    My awww moment of the day.
    by mike at 3:35pm

    Christian the lion, awwwww…..