Cable, telcos compete on interactivity

Part 4 of 6 – read part 1 and part 2 and part 3 here.

IPTV providers and cable companies are in the early stages of what could turn into an all-out race to interactivity on the television screen. After admitting that AT&T’s U-Verse service was giving it a run for its money, Time Warner Cable announced it was expanding its interactive TV push with help from app provider itaas. Verizon followed up by outlining its interactive TV plans, which fellow telcos AT&T, SureWest Communications and others are also beginning to pursue. Competition in interactivity, while just beginning, is clearly going to heat up. So, which pay TV provider has the leg up? Today, it’s anyone’s game.

IPTV providers will be the first to make a major push, according to Jeff Heynen, directing analyst of broadband and video at Infonetics Research. They’ve clearly already made moves in these directions and, with less of an installed base of set-top boxes with legacy middleware, fewer upgrades will be needed to enable interactivity.

“Being the new technology on the block facilitates their ability to offer interactive features first,” Heynen said. “That said, cable operators won’t be far behind. They are putting in place set-top boxes and tru2way frameworks to make these features easily deployed over their environment. You’ll see more and more STBs that are hybrid in cable that have a DOCSIS return path built in to enable that interactivity.”

In fact, according to Verizon’s Joe Ambeault, Cable Lab’s Open Cable Application Platform, or OCAP, standard means that OCAP-enabled STBs are already commercially available, and 20 million will find their way on to the market by the year’s end. Like the cablecos, Verizon is using OCAP subset enhanced binary interchange format (EBIF) to deliver interactivity that is bound into the video programming. TWC, the charter sponsor of ODEN, the OCAP/EBIF Developer Network, has actually been the most aggressive with pursuing this enabled interactivity so far, said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates. The cableco has been pushing out all new STBs to their new subscribers and encouraging their existing customers to relegate their legacy STBs to their second TV 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 up front 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 QAM.”