Home Page
Subscribe
Unsubscribe
Industry Jobs
Company Profiles
Events
Research & Papers
Glossary
Writers
Contact Us
Event: Review
PowerTV Developer's Conference '99, San Jose, CA
October 7 & 8, 1999 ITVT Issue 2.36 10/8/99
(Article best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer for accurate formatting.)
It's All About Power
By Tracy Swedlow, ITVT
ITVT attended day one of PowerTV's Developer's Conference at the Hayes Mansion in the heart of San Jose, California. There were 2 packed days of sessions; however, ITVT had only Thursday available. Attendance for the event was much larger than expected according to event organizer, Jessica Schieve. At the event, various speakers and analysts covered trends technologies, and future plans. Companies doing business with PowerTV presented in large and small sessions explaining their strategy and relationship to the host. Besides being stopped in the hallways by various people, (the best meeting place), ITVT attended a session or two. "Java on PowerTV", for example, focused on challenges and solutions developers face when incorporating the Sun language into the PowerTV operating system. In light of the ongoing controversy surrounding Java and its integration into various available standards, Java has a ways to go, according to the presenter. In general, time to boot the box and memory hogging is still a big problem. Until what's inside the box improves, PowerTV software, according to the presenter, will make up for some important problems and in one case removes several Java layers from the Java toolkit to make things simpler. "Birds of a Feather I" - Presenters included Guy Charboneau of Videotron, Jonathan Thompson of NTL (UK cable provider), and Michael Pasquinilli of Cox Communications. Each person presented his company's overall strategy and basic historical positioning. The two that seemed clearly defined were Johnathan Thompson's presentation of NTL and Mr. Pasquinilli's. NTL
Although NTL is currently using Liberate for analogue, they will be using PowerTV's OS for their digital platform which will be deployed late this year and into next. The plan is to offer more channels, near- vide-on-demand, interactive services, Web email, enhanced TV (next year some time), video-on-demand (first trial with DIVA end of Q1 next year) in that order. They are most interested in providing what he called "fenced prairie" not a "walled garden" approach for special information services. They are obviously very interested in multiple platform availability and want to maintain their connections to standards such as DVB-MHP and ATVEF. Cox Communiations
Michael Pasquinilli from Cox, on the other hand, stressed why interactive services at all? Specifically, he mentioned:
- competition from over-builders and DBS services,
- to improve customer retention, and
- achieve higher penetration.
Copyright 1998 - 2004 [ITVT] | Swedlow. All rights reserved