Dear iTV Doctor:
I read your column about the NBCU Olympic coverage, and I saw Steve Donohue's Facebook video of the ActiveVideo Networks coverage on Cablevision ( http://www.youtube.com/stevedonohue06). But frankly, I'm confused. I remember the company from their ICTV days, going back at least a decade. But now I see real commercial deployments, and that's obviously great news for the company. Here's what I want to know: What's different (between ActiveVideo and ICTV)? Why are they getting traction now? And, most importantly, HOW DOES IT WORK????
Freefalling in Philly
Dear Freefalling:
Like you, I've watched the ICTV-to-ActiveVideo Networks progression (they're now in close to 5 million homes) over the years, and I think their Olympic coverage on Cablevision was awesome. So I enlisted the help of ActiveVideo president and CEO, Jeff Miller, to help answer your questions. (Note: ActiveVideo Networks is a sponsor of The iTV Doctor: Sound Off!)
Let's set the stage. Do you remember the ending of the first "Men In Black" movie? We learned that the galaxy they had all been fighting over was embedded in a big marble, and some teenage alien needed that marble to complete his collection. "Size," as they said, "is relative."
So is distance. Not to sound too Einsteinian about it (and few would ever accuse me of that), but we don't care if our television content comes from 10 feet away, 10 miles away, or 22,500 miles up in space. As long as what we want gets there when we want it. We're an on-demand, i
nstant-gratification society. We even get mad at the short delay of digital channel switching, compared to the quick satisfaction of an analog tuner.
So when we click our remote in response to an on-screen trigger, we expect something really good to happen, right now. Unfortunately for traditional cable, putting "really good" and "right now" together in an interactive universe can be a real challenge. Most interactive applications have to load to the box before they can be played. And the richer the application (in terms of the consumer experience), the longer it takes to load. Conversely, the stuff that loads quickly is pretty basic.
That's where ActiveVideo comes in. With a very small software client that Jeff Miller says can be permanently installed in the box, a tremendously rich experience starts right now. And it's the same high-quality experience on every set-top box, from the low-end STB's that were the trailblazers of digital cable to next-generation media gateways. Since the early days of ICTV, ActiveVideo has maintained a singular focus: keep the interactive television content and intelligence in the cloud (servers and networks), so that all set-top boxes (even the lowly DCT 2000) can deliver a terrific consumer experience that every operator can be proud of.
Jeff explains it this way: "ActiveVideo can help operators deliver compelling, differentiating interactive experiences and Web-based content that subscribers want on the TV--without new set-top box investment. We like to say that we make TV smarter."
The easiest way to explain how it works is to think of your set-top box as a remote terminal, communicating with a central server. And since we're talking about television, the language is MPEG, the same standard that cable uses to transport video from the headend to the set-top box. Traditional and Web programmers and cable operators create rich, interactive content--shopping, advertising, sports, games, etc.--using standard Web tools. ActiveVideo uses their own technology to synthesize the content as an MPEG stream and deliver it to any STB. And the existing remote control and return path are used to interact, to navigate, to select and to play.
Jeff points out that there are several real advantages to this approach. First, because the processing is being done in the network cloud, and not by STB middleware, even the richest content can be written just once
and deployed everywhere. The Olympics coverage on Cablevision used exactly the same content as the coverage that ActiveVideo delivered to Oceanic Time Warner. Second, Jeff notes that that same content and user experience can be enjoyed on broadband-enabled TV's and CE devices. And third, you have the enormous processing power and storage of the server that enhances the processing and memory of every one of the millions of set-top boxes in the field today. And the bandwidth currently available puts that power in the palm of your hand. In a very real sense, ActiveVideo can give obsolete set top boxes new life and can exponentially improve the capabilities of the l
atest generations of STB's.
Let's say your system has a mixed bag of 100,000 set-top boxes (and there are systems with far more than that). You basically have three choices when it comes to offering competitive and profitable interactive television experiences: stick with what you've got (and risk losing your subscribers to better equipped competitors), replace any boxes that aren't state-of-the-art (just run THAT math to deliver new $400 boxes to tens of thousands of subscribers--and then think about another upgrade next year), or launch ActiveVideo Networks.
To answer your other question, let's compare ActiveVideo to their predecessor, ICTV. The original ICTV product required a lot more hardware for a lot less bandwidth. But now, through both acquisition and development, a single server running ActiveVideo software can deliver 300 times more streams than ICTV.
Jeff explains, "Let's put that into real-world terms: we can deliver the most popular and heavily used experience to one million subscribers with just 10 server blades. We can accommodate any of the largest cable systems in the country from a single rack of servers. A single rack: 19" wide, 72" tall. And the servers don't even have to be at the headend. We can deliver from our remote locations across the country."
The ActiveVideo folks supplied the following diagram. And if you have more questions, don't call me. Call them!
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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, and the first visit is always free. 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
