Synching Tablet to TV, Some Boundaries are Blurred

The cable industry’s Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) allows for the synching on the set-top box, but new fingerprinting and watermarking advances are opening the market to new devices and industry players, said Mike Ryan, CEO of A Different Engine, an interactive TV software developer. “There’s going to be a rush for mindshare there between the cable companies who want you doing that interacting on your set top box” and the CE makers that want the activity on the TV or other connected device, he said. The synchronized applications could be as simple as playing along with a TV game show, “checking in” while watching a program live or receiving coupons and shopping for items featured in programming, executives said.

Vendors such as Gracenote, IntoNow, Zietera and Nielsen all have approaches for synchronizing software applications on CE devices with TV programming. “It’s still early, and I like to say it’s the Wild West,” said Dan Eakins, Zietera’s CEO. “People can go over the top, not only around the distributor, but they can also go around the programmer,” and that’s motivating content owners to get involved more deeply, Eakins said. TV content owners, distributors and software makers with a background in EBIF development have all been interested in using the fingerprinting technology to develop applications for second-screen devices that are synchronized with what’s on the TV Set, Eakins said.

The technology can also be used to increase ratings of TV as it’s aired, said Didier Hilhorst, vice president of product and co-founder of IntoNow. The company recently worked with MTV on a sweepstakes that viewers entered by “checking in” with IntoNow’s iPad app during a broadcast, he said. “We saw about a four times increase in live viewing,” Hilhorst said: “Suddenly you're starting to drive this live viewing behavior and people are interested.” The company is talking to device manufacturers as well, Hilhorst said. “With a lot of connected TV’s, they're trying out how to go beyond just being a display screen,” he said. “Our goal would be to be on as many devices as possible."

Leaders will soon emerge among automatic content recognition vendors, said Geoff Katz, executive producer at Related Content Database (RCDb) a software developer and time metadata provider. “That quickly becomes a commodity level feature,” he said. Still, RCDb advises companies it works with to work to become the best sources of metadata about their content, said Doug Clarke, director RCDb’s embedded software program. “Rich metadata about your show is valuable and you, as the content owner, should control it,” he said. And the data will be necessary to develop robust interactive applications, Clarke said. Further, content owners can now deliver their shows and interactive applications directly to viewers, bypassing conventional distributors. “The ownership issues are complicated and our approach to building a business is to serve the content owner across all platforms,” Clarke said. RCDb is working on an application to display eBay auction information for products that appear in the TV programs being watched.

The technology is interesting, but doesn’t come without operational challenges, a cable industry executive said. “This is kind of a work-around, and it may work for some kinds of applications,” the executive said. “If you want to have very tight synchronization with the content and very accurate identification, or do something that’s presented in conjunction with the content, then you're probably going to run into problems … if you're just doing raw fingerprinting, without any integration with the service provider."