‘Wild West’ Environment for Interactive TV Prevails, but Cable Operators Still in the Mix
With Canoe having shifted its focus away from pursuing interactive TV applications and ad technology (CD Feb 23 p8), other interactive TV application developers and technology vendors say cable distributors will still have a role in growth of interactive TV. Without Canoe, a joint venture of the major cable operators, coordinating efforts among its members, companies that want to reach cable subscribers with interactive TV products will often have to cut individual deals with various distributors.
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"It’s back to the kind of wild west for the app developers trying to figure out who to talk to at all the various places,” said Stephen White, president of Gracenote. “There is a need and place for standards across the industry that allows application developers to reach a broad audience of cable and satellite end users without having to create 30 different flavors of an app,” he said. “It’s a great idea but it may be too early in the life cycle of interactive TV."
Now, new technology such as the automatic content recognition software sold by Gracenote and others is allowing companies to develop interactive applications that are synchronized with TV programming but carried on smart TV sets, phones and tablets (CD April 11 p12). And the look and feel of such applications can make a cable set-top box-based application that uses Enhanced TV Binary Exchange Format technology (EBIF) look outdated, industry executives said. “The way you render graphics in the set-top box is awful,” said Ashwin Navin, CEO of Flingo and co-founder of BitTorrent. “If your business is branding and advertising, you want your brand presented in the best possible light."
Apps on these platforms are also much easier and cheaper to deploy, said Mike Ryan, CEO of A Different Engine. “To get an EBIF app out on Comcast for example, it was just massive amounts of costs and certifications,” he said. “The [consumer electronics] guys just provided a much better way to do it."
But even for applications running on third-party devices, control of the set-top box may be critical. That would allow such applications to tune to different channels and schedule DVR recordings. “If you are a content owner and you want to reach the set-top box, you will have to go through the cable operator,” said John Gilles, executive vice president of marketing at Coincident TV. “Ultimately you're going to see set-top box-tablet integration, and so cable will resume its hegemony."
Moreover, it’s doubtful that consumers will want to run different apps on their TV sets or tablets for each program or network they're watching, said Gracenote’s White. “It’s natural you would go to the distributor,” he said. “A single app that covers all the DirecTV or all the Comcast content is a pretty natural evolution."
TV and game console makers may also try to provide that sort of app, White said. “And let’s not forget about Apple, who has the opportunity to have a huge role here,” he said. Should expectations that the company will introduce a TV set be met, it would have “all the pieces of the puzzle,” he said.