TellyTopia finds aggressive competitors pursue interactive TV

Interactive video application provider TellyTopia celebrates its first anniversary of commercial deployment this week, expecting that its "keep-it-simple” approach to tying Internet videos to interactive TV and advertising will continue to attract both cable and IPTV providers.  A big part of TellyTopia’s success so far has been in providing hyper-local content, including user-generated content and easy-to-deploy interactive local ads.

"We have probably less than half a dozen [service provider] deployments that I can talk about, but we are in discussions with many more,” said Kshitij Kumar, chief executive officer of TellyTopia. Some of those deployments are with telecom service providers such as SureWest Communications, and others are with cable companies. "It’s always the service provider who is the ‘more aggressive one’ in an area that is a first mover with us, and since we’ve built everything over IP, it ends up that the more aggressive one is a telco or other TV operator who wants something to differentiate with.”

What TellyTopia provides is a sophisticated content management system that can identify Internet-based video content, deliver it to the existing video system and enable consumers to upload their own videos via the Internet so those can be included on either a video channel or an on-demand video menu, Kumar said.

"Our principal has been to make anything that needs to be done by a paid TV operator really simple – that is what drove our strategy,” Kumar said. "We create a system that does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. We have a sophisticated distributed content management system that we created that is talking to thousands of content providers through Web services – it even talks to online portals. We make relationships, we collect content automatically, check the quality of the videos that are coming through, do analysis for copyrights, look at the maturity of content – we are doing all that behind the scenes.”

Once all that content is created, TellyTopia uses what it calls the I-catcher – a single-box solution that sits at the cable or video headend alongside other video delivery boxes – to deliver the content to the video system.

The video content comes with what looks like Internet banner ads, and these can be interactive, if the video provider has deployed Enhanced Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) technology, or can be non-interactive, Kumar said. "These are inexpensive, cost-effective ads for small and medium businesses -- folks who can’t afford to advertise on Cable TV."