Roku box opens this month with Skitter

ORLANDO -- Roku will formally release its Channel Store in the next week or two, debuting it with about 10 channels and expecting to see 15 or 20 before the end of the year, Jim Funk, Roku’s vice president of business development, said during a panel discussion on the first day of the Telco TV trade show.

Roku is opening its $99 broadband-fed video set top box to outsiders with a software development kit. Ars Technica has reported that early partners will include Revision3, TWiT TV, Mediafly, Motionbox and blip.tv. Today Funk said that another outsider gaining entry to the Roku box through that SDK is SkitterTV, a startup whose service (a mix of local off-air broadcast and Internet TV) launched publicly last month and is already in trials with several tier-two and tier-three telcos. On Roku, Skitter's service will be hidden from Roku users who don't also subscribe to SkitterTV through their telecom service provider. (Separately today, SkitterTV announced a partnership with Zeugma Systems that adds quality of service controls to the service.)

“This is the way for people delivering [content] to the PC to get to the TV,” Funk said of Roku’s Channel Store. “But also a lot of media companies are looking at alternative distribution. I think you’ll see some interesting announcements over the coming year of very high-quality brand names delivered over the top.”

Roku, which began with a focus on movies, has been branching out to other forms of content. This summer it began offering live Major League Baseball games, for example.

Addressing the telco audience in particular, Funk added, “There are also opportunities in this for telco distribution and customization. We get calls all the time from telcos asking, ‘Can I bundle this with a higher tier of my DSL service? Can I co-brand this?’ There’s lots of ways we can work with you."