Interactive TV Tries Again

“What's really cool about that is that if there is nothing on TV, then make your TV,” said Jaime Montes, product marketing manager for SureWest. “This enables us to bring together data and video and allow an avenue for our customers to upload content to the TV.”

In Kansas, SureWest teamed up with BIAP, which offers interactive applications using EBIF. SureWest's Kansas customers can do Yellow Pages look-ups on TV, make and track eBay auction items, play fantasy football and track local information such as sports and weather. SureWest also offers caller ID on the TV in Kansas and hopes to bring that to California soon as well.

“We're hoping to bring BIAP to California and i2TV to Kansas at some point this year,” Montes said. “The challenge ends up being resources. There are so many things going on right now with video — whether it's everywhere TV, whether it's online content, whether it's new channels. There are only so many resources that you have.”

Cable players, including Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable also are moving aggressively to interactivity, using OCAP-enabled STBs now coming on the market and OCAP's successor, tru2way. TWC, the charter sponsor of the OCAP/EBIF Developer Network, has actually been the most aggressive in pursuing this enabled interactivity so far, said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst for Parks Associates. The cableco has been pushing out all new STBs to new subscribers and encouraging existing customers to relegate legacy STBs to second TVs in the home, reserving the main TV for the latest version of the box.

“It's easier to say that IPTV has the advantage because they made the huge investment upfront and their applications speak the same language as today's Internet applications, IP,” Scherf said. “That creates an interactive experience right there, while cable companies are figuring out how to shoehorn interactivity with today's [quadrature amplitude modulation].”

QAM is the format in which digital cable channels are encoded and transmitted. Zodiac Interactive is one company working on this side of the equation, championing tru2way and interactive widgets. Through its PowerUp framework, it offers open application programming interfaces and libraries that allow for a broad range of apps to be developed, working across multiple combinations of tru2way components — including authoring tools, stacks of middleware, STBs and TVs — to remove interoperability concerns.

Zodiac and STB-maker ADB teamed up to integrate Zodiac's PowerTV with ADB's products — the end goal being the rapid deployment of tru2way and EBIF apps for interactive services, including advanced guides, targeted advertising and TV widgets.

Zodiac enables development of both bound and unbound apps — those tied to a specific channel, show and time or a separate on-demand widget, respectively. Unbound apps are more common today, said Alex Libkind, co-founder of Zodiac. These are widgets similar to what Intel and Yahoo! are offering, but he said these apps are much too memory-intensive for any STB to support today.

Even Libkind admitted that being the newer of the two with more available memory, IPTV providers have an edge on cablecos. “Cable operators are looking for where IPTV is innovating and making sure they keep at least parity, if not one-upmanship,” he said. Whereas telcos have traditionally been stuck playing catch-up with cablecos on their home turf, TV, this might be one area where the ball is in IPTV providers' court.

Other players such as Alcatel-Lucent, Integra5 and TellyTopia are bringing new technology directly to service providers to do interactivity.

Alcatel-Lucent, building on Microsoft's Mediaroom Presentation Framework, created a digital media suite of products for interactive multimedia apps, which Telefonica already is using to conduct an interactive IPTV advertising application proof of concept for its Imagenio IPTV service. Telefonica has been using the Alcatel-Lucent interactive technology to increase interactivity and bring Web 2.0 features to its IPTV service since mid-December 2008 and is now engaged in letting TV viewers use their remote controls to access interactive content linked to specific consumer brands featured in commercials.

The goal in creating the Alcatel-Lucent Multimedia Content Manager and Interactive Media Manager is to enable more rapid, flexible and easier development of interactivity, whether for advertising or content purposes, said Rudi Broos, head of marketing for the digital media and advertising division of Alcatel-Lucent's application software group.

“Interactive Media Manager is a template-based solution where either the media agency representing a certain brand — say, Coca-Cola or BMW — or the content producer making a show — like [American] Idol or Big Brother — can now develop interactive TV applications,” Broos said. “So consumers can vote for contestants on Idol, or they can watch TV commercials and push a button and get additional information or win a bottle of Coke or get [a text message] with a discount for 50% off at a shop. Whatever you want to do, we have made this available based on templates. The agency or content producer doesn't have to know anything about the digital capabilities of IPTV platforms.”

The templates are Web-based and application-specific — the creative agency or content producer just picks the one best-suited for their application, fills out the template and hits a “publish” button, Broos said. “It always works, and the template doesn't allow you to break the system,” he added. “It makes the process of creating new interactive TV applications less expensive by 80%.”

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