MWA: LaJoie says ahoy to TM Forum

DALLAS--In his keynote address at the TM Forum’s Management World Americas, Time Warner Cable Chief Technology Officer Mike LaJoie said joining the TM Forum along with several other cable providers is “an opportunity to raise all tides and float all boats.”

And as TM Forum president Martin Creaner said in his own address, the similarities and common goals between the industries far outweigh their differences.

Growth for the industry depends on the pace of technical innovation, LaJoie said. “We have to anticipate customer demand and make the investment.”

HDTV is one example. “The trend is toward ubiquity, as people are falling in love with their TVs all over again,” he said.

With 35.8 million devices in play today and growing to 54.3 million by 2010, LaJoie also pointed to the growing phenomenon of home networking and the opportunity that presents to service providers.

Other trends are less certain, such as social networking, which is gathering a lot of attention, though people haven’t figured out how to monetize it yet, LaJoie said.

Most of all, what people want is untethered entertainment, LaJoie said. They are getting it partly through converged devices, and now convergence needs to happen in the network.

He also made it clear that IPTV may have nothing on Time Warner Cable. LaJoie described the company's interactive services such as video on demand and enhanced TV, which has features such as Start Over, which, as its name implies, allows users to come in at any point during the original broadcast window of a show and start it over form the beginning. TWC won a technology Emmy award for this feature last year.

On the telephony front, the company introduced a global IP phone that gives 3000 minutes for $20. “I don’t know if this points to the advancement of telephony or the decline of telephony,” he said.

La Joie also indicated that the Catalyst project the company is involved in—which explores better ways of doing mobile backhaul services—could lead TWC into a new line of business. “It is a simple product but new to us and one which we are now embarking on,” he said. “We want to generate revenue by providing that service to mobile operators. They need an end-to-end solution.”