I’m feeling feisty today, and for good reason. This week, Cablevision Systems, one of the largest cable operators in the country, showed what can be done when applications are streamed from the cloud.
Cablevision used—wait for it!—ActiveVideo’s® CloudTV™ app platform to create personalized navigation that’s miles beyond anything else that’s available to cable subscribers. The cool new iO TV Quick Views mosaic is the kind of app that consumers would expect from an Apple or Google—if Apple and Google had relationships with cable. Check out this video to see the app in action.
iO TV Quick Views isn’t just a personalized mosaic—and a killer mosaic at that. With up to 9 tiles of streaming video glory, you’ll be feeling like a Wall Street day trader. It’s also a personalized EPG with DVR integration. Like most of the 25 CloudTV apps already in Cablevision homes, iO Quick Views was built, using our tool kit, by Cablevision and third-party developers to run on any Cablevision digital set-top box.
Cablevision unveiled the app yesterday. And I love the part in its press release when Cablevision talked about how iO TV Quick Views “leverages the unique capabilities of ActiveVideo Networks’ CloudTV platform to combine personalization and live video.”
All kinds of unique features of our platform were involved here—things like multi-tile video, personalization, metadata display, guide functionality and DVR programming capabilities—but I’ll leave that to the technical geeks in the next office. From a marketing standpoint, what’s really cool is that Cablevision showed that it’s as easy to create apps on our platform as it is for the iPhone or the iPad.
For TV app creation to really take off, we’ve got to offer developers the type of critical mass they get in mobile and PC environments. Big companies like Netflix have an army of developers that writes apps for every permutation of every device, but the little guy who’s creating the next “Angry Birds” can’t do that for TV—unless the app development platform is in the cloud.
CloudTV can change television in a way that Apple or Google couldn’t. We can bring developers together with cable and satellite operators AND TV manufacturers to offer cool new apps that don’t require consumers to buy and hook up new boxes. That’s truly game-changing stuff!
So pardon my chest-thumping (ow!), but the momentum is building behind CloudTV. And I can’t wait to talk about more success stories as 2011 progresses.
