Start-up Hillcrest delves into digital TV

A Maryland start-up company is promising to dramatically change the way consumers navigate the increasingly complex world of digital television, creating a new navigation system the replaces the 100-plus button remote control with a two-button, intuitive free-space pointing device that is the trigger to a new multi-dimensional content framework.

Hillcrest Labs was founded by Dan Simpkins, who previously founded softswitch-maker Salix and sold it to Tellabs, and is taking its story public today by demonstrating its HoME navigational system at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference in San Diego. The company has already been working behind the scenes with many of the companies who are battling for market share in the digital home space, including consumer electronics firms as well as competing service providers.

And while some of the early press has focused on the free-space pointing device, called "The Loop," for its lightweight circular design and two-button simplicity, what Hillcrest Labs is offering is intended as truly disruptive technology.

"It's not really about the device but a revolutionary navigation system," said Simpkins, in a telephone interview from San Diego. "We are seeing a real sea change in the industry--the battle for the digital home is on. There are a number of companies trying to take the leadership position. What we realized was that there was a significant gap in technology. There was no effective navigation platform that allows users to easily get at all the new digital content."

What Hillcrest Labs created is a system its calls "Spontaneous Navigation," that combines the free-space pointing remote with an application framework, known as Hillcrest HoME. Within HoME is a metadata engine that presents a library of data on applications in such a way that users can easily move in many different directions from any one point or application within the system.

Unlike existing remote controls, The Loop is multi-dimensional--it behaves much more like a computer mouse than a traditional TV remote, said analyst Daniel Briere, president of TeleChoice.

"Today's navigational systems are hierarchical--you follow the bread crumbs," he said. "Those systems can only go up-down or left-right. This is a six-dimensional system and it can also go backwards and forwards."

Instead of having to back in and out of a set of hierarchical menus or to use a combination of 180 different buttons on a remote control device, consumers can intuitively use The Loop and the Hillcrest Labs navigational system to go from viewing movie possibilities to choosing a sound track instead, or from looking at one movie by an actress to seeing a list of all of her movies.

Ease of use is the critical factor, Simpkins said.

"We have two kinds of behavior--instinctive and learned," he said. "The idea is to use the instinctive. We have given it to people five years old and 85 years old, and they are all able to pick it up and start playing it. It's dramatically different from all the others. For the first time a device is able to be used in the living room at 10 feet that allows consumers to point at what they want. We point before we speak, before we walk, really. And this is very simple, much like a mouse."

Simpkins and management partners Andy Addis and Mitch Praver, both executive vice presidents, said they are not directly challenging Microsoft, whose IPTV platform includes navigation, but intending to sell its software across the market.

"What we've done is build a highly portable environment--Hillcrest as a universal supplier of software technology to various manufacturers," said Simpkins. "We are very excited--it is highly flexible and highly personalizable. It can give service providers the power to present a service in their own unique way. It changes the equation as they are able to present their own individual products and to brand them as never before."

Addis, a former Comcast executive, said telephone companies in particular see Hillcrest HoME as a means of differentiating their video offerings--although Hillcrest Labs is also talking with cable companies.

The company has been smart in making it possible for companies to easily add "skins"--or customization--to its systems, while providing the front-end and back-end hooks to integrate existing and new applications, said Briere. "This is truly disruptive technology--like the mouse was to the PC," he said.