The iTV Doctor Is In!: Founder, Will Kreth, Explains the Work of OEDN

Dear iTV Doctor:

I've read a lot about OEDN over the last year. It is clear they are doing a great job in getting awareness of development efforts for EBIF and tru2way. But it is less clear on where they are going. Will the universities (like NYU and Ball State) actually have ITV certification programs? We'd like to start building a staff of young, talented interactive television developers to take us to that place we all know we're going--a fully interactive television viewing experience across multiple channels and multiple platforms.

Looking to the Future


Dear Looking:

You may have hit on the single greatest benefit of OEDN going forward--establishing a wide base of talented and experienced interactive television developers who are ready to rock! But to learn more about OEDN, let me turn you over to Will Kreth, senior director of advanced video strategy for Time Warner Cable and founder of OEDN. Here's what Will has to say:

The charter of OEDN is really two-fold:

1) Broadly socialize information for all interested developers about digital cable's main two open standards for ITV application development (EBIF and OCAP/tru2way), so as to lower the barriers to entry.

2) Reach out to academic programs at universities that teach interactive media app development, and help seed them with the tools necessary to build ITV apps, based on these standards, so as to become part of their curriculum over the long-term.

When we started OEDN back in 2007, it was apparent that ITV app development within digital cable had issues on at least two fronts: The first was that there had been work on the Open Cable Application Platform (or OCAP, now tru2way) for a decade, yet no real movement to greatly lower the barriers to entry for developers to build OCAP/tru2way applications (remember, EBIF was still only being tested in labs at that time). The costs to develop, test and market these applications to the cable industry were astronomical, and created a powerful disincentive to new developers in the space. From the outside, only a handful of companies could stick around long enough to keep "skin in the game" of trying to sell into the cable industry.

Meanwhile, we could see that the world was changing, or rather HAD changed, as Web app development had exploded, and the ideas and concepts of Web 2.0 were really beginning to take hold. Control was moving closer to the developers and users of these apps, and cable (at that time) didn't appear to have a game plan to attract a new and innovative generation of app developers. We were watching what was happening with Facebook's app development platform, and the prying-open of the mobile handset carriers' app suite to "off-deck" apps, and it was clear (at least to me) that the writing was on the wall. Mass-market computing platforms, CE devices and mobile smartphones were all going to become more open, more flexible and more innovative in their approach to third-party apps. Pure and simple. The question became: how would/could cable respond?

The second issue was that no university program in the US had even heard about EBIF or OCAP/tru2way, and what app development they did teach was centered around PC- and Web-based apps. This is where the real volume is, so that was to be expected. I could see that several years of students moving into software development fields would graduate without ever even considering a career developing ITV apps targeted at digital cable. It seemed that no one within my own industry had considered that this might happen, and if they had considered that it might be an issue to elevate.

So the public launch of OEDN was in February 2008 at the CableLabs Winter Conference, and throughout that year we worked to build our online developer community at OEDN.net. This spring, we were proud to announce that four additional cable MSO's would join Time Warner Cable in sponsoring OEDN. Those companies were (and are) Bright House Networks, Charter, Cablevision and Liberty Global International. Since that time, we've been able to work with two US schools (NYU and Ball State University) to do what we said we were going to do: get the tools in the hands of students, so that they could start to develop applications for ITV.

In July, we helped facilitate a workshop session about EBIF app building at NYU's ITP lab (which is, by the way, celebrating its 30th anniversary this October), where students for the first time built ITV apps. But building applications using the free TVWorks XDK is one thing; the next step is to test them. So we continue to work with folks like the Comcast Media Center and enableTV to create what we call the "ITV Round-Trip," a virtual test environment that will send the student's application to play in a real cable headend, located at either the CMC or enableTV, stream the app to a development set-top box, and then, using a Slingbox on one end and SlingPlayer on the other, return that app's play-out to be controlled using the same workstation where the student developed it.

This is our next step, and we're on track to make this happen in the September/November time frame for both NYU and Ball State students. Ensequence was generous enough to give Ball State a one-year license for their on-Q Create EBIF app authoring tool, and provided free training as well. TVWorks' release of their ETV XDK for free was a real game-changer, and we're deeply indebted to both of these companies for making it happen.

Right now, we've got videos on the OEDN.net Web site from both NYU's Shawn Van Every and Ball State's Mike Bloxham, and I think some of the "aha!" moment is there in the clips; you can see why we're doing this and understand how this could eventually spread to several schools across the US. These are the schools and the graduate programs that thrive on the idea of cross-platform app development and "mash-ups," and that's where the real innovation lives, out on the edge of ideation: not knowing that you "can't" do something in software, because no one ever told you that it wouldn't work!

We have gotten tremendous support from everyone who has taken the time to dig into what we're doing, and the schools are very appreciative of the effort. Ultimately, we need a way to make this a more robust development and testing model, but for now we're going to keep pushing to do what we said we were going to do: get the tools in the hands of the students and start the ball rolling. So to answer your question: yes, we do want schools to include ITV training on the very same tools the cable industry uses to build ITV apps as part of their curriculum. Certification is probably too formal of a process for what we're trying to do, at least initially.

If you want to learn more and to keep up-to-date with our progress, you can join our Web site at http://www.oedn.net using Facebook Connect, and/or join our Fan Page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and join our group on LinkedIn.


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The iTV Doctor is Rick Howe, who provides interactive television consulting services to programmers and advertisers. He is the recipient of a CTAM Tami Award for retention marketing and this year was nominated to Cable Pioneers. He is also the co-author of a patent for the use of multiscreen mosaics in EPG's. Endorsed by top cable and satellite distributors, "Dr" Howe still makes house calls. His services include product development, distribution strategy and the development of low-cost interactive applications for rapid deployment across all platforms. Have a question for the iTV Doctor? Email him at itvdoctor@itvt.com