What's brewing at Building B?

The new company has a unique way to get telcos into video quickly.

So you've never heard of Building B? Join the crowd.

The Belmont, Calif., company has been quietly moving into the video entertainment market, offering broadband service providers a way to add video to their portfolio without major infrastructure upgrades. When one of its executives — David Allred, senior vice president of marketing — spoke recently at a seminar before TelcoTV in Atlanta, the industry interest was obvious by the number of telecom execs waving business cards.

Founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bruno Pati and Phil Wiser, the former chief technology officer for Sony Corp. of America and a digital music pioneer who founded Liquid Audio, Building B is combining some unique elements — its own set-top box (STB) and remote control, for example — with a fundamentally different approach to delivering video content into the home. Under its scheme, 95% of that content would be transmitted wirelessly via WiMAX, 700 MHz, digital television spectrum or some other as-yet unnamed approach, and stored at the STB.

An informal polling of industry leaders and analysts showed almost no one had heard of the company, and many were ready to be skeptical. Tony Stanley, director of marketing and business development for Scientific Atlanta, was among many who questioned the reliability of wireless spectrum for video content.

Questions like that will be answered, Allred said, when the company makes a more formal debut in late November. In the meantime, he did share some details about what Building B — a name that is likely to change — is up to.

The firm has designed both a powerful STB with massive storage capabilities and an eight-button remote control that allows consumers to easily access both broadcast and stored video as well as Internet content. The service also offers a high degree of per-user customization with individual log-ins via remote control.

“We will use a collaborative filtering approach similar to Amazon, with algorithms that offer recommendations,” Allred said. “But we are going beyond that. Instead of recommending a program to you, we just go ahead and record it and present it in your profile. We record a tremendous amount of content — 1000 hours of content at any one time — and we allow users to create playlists, or ‘best of’ lineups.”

By partnering with broadband service providers, the company can use a DSL or cable modem connection to deliver video content that doesn't come in wirelessly, as well as offer interactivity for video-on-demand, Allred said. Service providers supply the customer base, customer relationships, broadband data services and customer support. Building B provides the wireless capability, the content aggregation, and the STB and remote control. The partners share revenue from subscriptions and, ultimately, advertising.

The service itself will be more personal and able to dispense the targeted advertising that IPTV is capable of delivering, he said. With one click, users will be able to access Internet-based information related to what they are viewing.

“It gives us the ability to deliver new types of services,” Allred said. Targeted advertising becomes more possible because the STB tracks specific user activity. “If you are browsing travel sites, we can even push travel advertising to you,” he said.

BUILDING B's APPROACH

Building B was named for founder Bruno Pati's renovated barn where the company met.

A
Transport: 95% of content delivered wirelessly to set-top boxes.

B
Set-top box can record up to 1000 hours of programming.

C
Remote control is designed for ease of use and per-user customization.

D
Broadband connection delivers video as well as interactive and Internet content.

E
Content aggregation: To provide turnkey solution, video content is part of the package.