Legends of ITV

By Patrick Donoghue

Homecoming: The Tale of Two Virtual Cities

In many ways, writing this ITV Legends column is a lot like returning to the little town I grew up in: seeing old friends, sharing stories, and visiting places I'd long since forgotten. It was great to hear from so many people about the city interfaces they built for ITV and, with a little coercion, I got some great stories. It turns out that even virtual cities have a bad part of town where you keep you eyes open and your hands on your wallet.

In retrospect, the city I built for Viacom was pretty barren, but Beethoven 2 was always playing at the movies and there was an all-night ITV pinochle game going at the big blue games arcade! One problem with these virtual spaces is where to break out of the metaphor and get down to business with things like movie pricing, rental period, parental controls, etc. At some point, we had to leap out of our three-dimensional worlds and "go flat."

The Magic Music Store

Dave Johnson took a stab at this in the early work he did for Time Warner Cable's Full Service Network. Dave has been working in the games and ITV space for years, and has great stories about designing the graphics for old Colecovision games on graph paper.

The Full Service Network was a digital video trial conducted by Time Warner in Orlando, Florida, which launched on December 14th, 1994 and lasted for 18 months. During that time, 4,000 customers had free access to an interactive digital system, which included video-on-demand, shopping, games, a program guide, and US Postal Service functions.

Dave was brought in to design the graphics for an interactive music mall that would allow consumers to buy CD's and related items on their TV's.

The Full Service Network's set-top box was based on a Silicon Graphics engine, so the operative buzz-phrase was "real-time 3D graphics." Early concept meetings had Time Warner executives describing how they wanted to use a virtual glove to fly down the corridors of the virtual mall, entering stores, selecting and sampling CD's, and interacting with other customers while being guided by virtual salespeople.

"Since I was developing the graphics with a primitive, text-based, ray-tracing program, I was relieved when the client insisted, 'The interface will be 2D,' "Dave recalled in an email.

So, what you see in the image above is a nod to the client's wishes--with the outside of the cleverly named "Magic Music Store" rendered in 3D. The mall was designed as a rotunda. Pressing the left and right arrow keys on the remote moved you in a circle so that you would face a new storefront with each key press. Once you "entered" the store, the interface flattened out into a 2D list-like display.

"In retrospect, this screen looks pretty chaotic but it's surprising how much of the basic layout and functionality is in use today," Dave wrote.

The Wrong Side of the Tracks in a Virtual City

In 1996 Bob Holmes and Sudden Industries took on a project called "The Professionals," which always made them laugh because they were half-convinced that the guys funding it had a shady mob background--too much money and no one knew where it was coming from. "The Professionals" themselves, of course, didn't get the joke.

The application was designed to provide access to professional services on a subscription- and ad-supported basis--sort of like an animated, virtual-world Yellow Pages. Click on a virtual hospital, go inside, and choose from among different professionals, represented by symbolic avatars. Click on a movie theater to get tickets, or click on an airplane to get flight promotions. The ultimate goal was to move this off of disc/browser and onto interactive TV. The investors were talking Qube/FSN/Columbus/Orlando--big talk, unrealistic talk.

Bob wrote in an email: "My last memory of the project (and this is no lie) is standing in a parking lot in the East Village. [The investors] had an envelope with cash in one hand and we had a bag with all the discs and code in our hands. We counted the cash, performed a hand-off with the discs, and the rest was history."

That was the first major project that Sudden Industries did as a company. Since then, Bob and Sudden have done all kinds of great work in interactive TV and in interactivity in general. As far as Bob knows, "The Professionals" are still at large.

Send in your examples

Calling all legends and battle-scarred veterans. Don't let your stories go untold. We are collecting some great tales from the unsung heroes of ITV.

Many thanks to Bob Holmes at Sudden Industries and Dave Johnson at http://davej.com

Patrick J. Donoghue is an ITV veteran with the scars to prove it. Since 1992 he has received four Emmys and an [itvt] Award for Leadership in Interactive Television for his work in the field. To submit materials for his column, email donoghue@itvt.com. To read the previous Legends of ITV column, click here.

Daniel Levy, VP of Sales and Marketing, Infogate Online

Daniel Levy is VP of sales and marketing at Israeli IPTV technology provider, Infogate Online. He recently spoke to [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow about Infogate's attempts to penetrate the US market, about the company's new ViewCore IPTV middleware, service delivery and content management platform, about his view of the future of the IPTV market, and more.

[itvt]: Could you give us a little background on your company, Daniel?

Levy: Infogate Online was established in 1999 and is a member of the RAD Bynet Group. We have two main offices: one in Israel with R&D, marketing and international sales, and the other in the US to provide sales and customer service support to the US, Canada and South America. We offer an IPTV service delivery platform called ViewCore, and we partner with other IPTV solution providers to offer sets of best-of-breed solutions to broadband service providers.

[itvt]: What is the RAD Bynet Group?

Levy: The RAD Bynet Group, which is part of the RAD Group, is composed of 20 diverse companies that had approximately $650 million in revenues between them last year. Six of the member companies are traded on NASDAQ. The member companies have complementary IP technologies--and, as a result, have a shared knowledge base. So, as a member of the group, Infogate not only has strong financial backing, but is able to draw on the other companies' technologies, instead of having to search the world for complementary technologies and then enter complicated technology-exchange relationships. Also, most of the RAD Group companies are within 10 miles of one another.

[itvt]: Could you tell us a little bit about your efforts to penetrate the US market?

Levy: Infogate has identified the US vertical markets which we believe to be the most open to IPTV technology at this time, and these are tier 2 and tier 3 rural telcos. However, there are some additional markets that we are very interested in, and these are ISP's, municipalities, and Multiple Tenant and Dwelling Units (MTU/MDU). Many ISP's, just like regular telcos, have realized that they need to offer triple-play services in order to continue to be viable service providers to their customers. We have identified several ISP's that have recognized this necessity, and we are in the final stages of negotiations with them. We believe many more ISP's will add IPTV to their basket of services over the coming years. As for municipalities, a large number of them have deployed or are deploying "fiber-to-the-x"--where "x" can mean the curb, the premises or the home. They are now trying to determine the various services they can deploy over this new infrastructure. Finally, as far as the MTU/MDU space is concerned, new buildings and communities are, by default, being built with FTTx infrastructure in place, in preparation for new technology demands. I recently visited Florida, and I was totally amazed by the level of wiring that was already in place. The companies that build these buildings and communities want to be able to provide triple-play--and even quadruple-play--services with very high-quality entertainment offerings. There are actually MTU and MDU owners that are already functioning as small service operators--offering video, voice and Internet data services.

So these are the markets we are currently targeting in the US. We have already had some success with tier 3 rural telcos, such as Citizens Cablevision and Scott County Telephone Cooperative in Virginia, and there are several prospects that we are in the process of closing deals with in the midwest and southeast.

Now, one issue we face as a foreign company targeting the US is that potential customers might take exception to us coming in and saying, "Work with us. We know better." The way we address this is by delivering our IPTV solutions via local IPTV players. We have partnered with systems integrators and consultants that our customers trust and feel comfortable with. Part of our sales strategy is to make sure we offer our solutions through the right US channels.

As I mentioned earlier, we have an office--located in Mahwah, New Jersey--which focuses exclusively on serving the US market, and which has sales, marketing and customer support operations. In addition to working on sales, our US office is tasked with building strategic alliances with other IPTV component vendors, so as to be able to provide US customers with a complete and fully integrated solution.

[itvt]: How important is the US market to Infogate's future?

Levy: Due to the size of the US market and the number of tier 2 and tier 3 telcos there, as well as all the MDU's/MTU's there that have installed or are planning to install FTTx, we see this market as holding a great deal of opportunity for IPTV services. Overall, we expect US sales to eventually account for more than 60% of Infogate Online's revenues, which is the reason we have invested so much in building a presence in the US.

[itvt]: Now while your US wins to date have been with tier 3 telcos, I understand that you're increasing your efforts to go after tier 2 telcos, correct?

Levy: Yes. Our strategy is to work with systems integrators to put together consortia of vendors that can offer end-to-end IPTV solutions to tier 2 telcos. An example of this is the Unisys consortium that was launched at the TelcoTV show last fall in San Diego. The consortium is composed of several leading vendors: Optibase for encoding, BitBand for video servers, Amino for set-top boxes, Irdeto for conditional access, Occam Networks for broadband access networks, Juniper for networking, and, of course, tying the package together, Infogate Online's ViewCore service delivery platform which is the IPTV middleware solution for the consortium. So we've assembled a complete, end-to-end solution encompassing every single element within IPTV. In this particular consortium, Unisys serves as the primary contact in front of the customer, thus assuring the customer that they will get the best installation and the highest level of support. We are very proud of the creation of this consortium.

What we're doing here is actually quite the opposite of what usually happens in the IPTV space in the US, where companies normally try to find the customer first, and then attempt to assemble the solution for them. Our consortium's solution has been pre-tested and integrated by Unisys, which has field-proven experience in IPTV integration.

[itvt]: Can you say if you are close to closing any deals with tier 2 telcos for a solution provided by the consortium?

Levy: Not yet.

[itvt]: Is Infogate pursuing deals with tier 1 telcos internationally, or have you pretty much decided to focus on smaller telcos and service providers across the board?

Levy: Yes, Infogate is pursuing deals with tier 1/national telcos in the Asia Pacific region. Our offering in that region is similar to that of the consortium in the US that I just mentioned.

[itvt]: How do you position your ViewCore middleware against competing solutions in the market?

Levy: Our middleware is not tied to specific hardware; as a result the service provider or the systems integrator can choose the best IPTV elements to integrate with it. The service provider doesn't have to--as is the case with several other middleware vendors--purchase proprietary networking equipment, video servers or encoders together with our middleware.

We concentrate our core competencies on middleware. Our middleware isn't, for example, an extension of an encoder, a video server or a piece of networking equipment--we're not a company that says, "Buy my encoders and I'll give you the middleware for free." We don't see middleware as a prize in a box of cereal, so to speak. Our middleware is an independent IPTV element that integrates easily with other IPTV elements to provide the complete solution set required. This focus and independence enables us to develop exactly what we want, and not what internal pressures may decide--which is also an advantage for the service provider.

[itvt]: Could you talk a little more about your ViewCore platform's feature set?

Levy: ViewCore is based on the same platform as its predecessor, OnDema. However, it has various new features and has been improved to meet the demands of the market. One of its strongest features is its advanced graphical user interface, which was designed and enhanced based on feedback we received from our customers.

One very important advantage ViewCore offers is its sophisticated and easy-to-use solution for content provision. This solution allows you not only to package the content--specify the pricing, and decide what kind of metadata you include with it--but also to create effective marketing campaigns around it, such as creating alerts to let people know that you have, for example, five movies on sale, or that you're doing a buy-one-movie-get-one-free promotion. We provide tools for broadband service providers to actually make money out of their IPTV service.

Another powerful element of ViewCore is its internal report generator, which provides the customer with very precise reports and analysis, without having to first export the data to an external report generator. ViewCore tracks and lists who has been watching what and for how long; for example, if the service provider wants to know how often viewers are watching a particular channel or movie, or what are the viewing patterns of a specific viewer or group of viewers in regard to specific content, ViewCore will easily generate the appropriate report.

Now, why is this so important to an operator? One reason is because it strengthens the operator's hand in negotiations with content providers. An operator can go back to the content provider and say, "Look, I'm paying you for 250 channels. But there are 50 of them that I can prove to you that less than 5% of my customers are watching for less than 3% of the time, and I want to replace them with something better." Or the operator can look at a specific local channel and go back to an advertiser and say, "I can prove to you that channel 5 is being watched, within my customer base of 15,000, by 6,700 people every Friday between 8 and 9PM."

[itvt]: And you're saying that your competitors don't offer these kinds of tools?

Levy: Competing solutions often offer a less user-friendly and straightforward data-reporting service. Often the data needs to be exported to an external report generator. The service provider would have to add one more network element in order to enable the processing of the data requested.

[itvt]: Since the US market is so important to Infogate, does ViewCore offer any features specifically targeted at that market?

Levy: Yes. When we tested our solution against some of our competition, the biggest criticism we received was that our EPG search was not powerful enough. This was to be expected, since we had been developing for a European TV environment where operators would offer, at most, 100 channels. However, now that we are targeting the US market, where operators can offer up to 200 or 250 channels, our EPG search functionality clearly has to be more advanced--something a little more practical than just scrolling up and down. In ViewCore we have implemented a keyword search functionality that allows the user to enter search terms on-screen via the remote control.

In addition to enhancing our middleware's features, we have also lightened up its architecture, which allows us to provide appropriate middleware solutions for all the different tiers of the IPTV market. ViewCore is available with three types of architecture: premium, standard and compact--targeted respectively at tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 telcos. Our IPTV service delivery platform was originally designed to support a totally distributed architecture, including the content-provisioning headend, the central master itself, and edge server farms. It was designed that way to support hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of subscribers. With the new architecture models, we have lightened the middleware platform, and optimized and compressed it, to a level where it can be supported by just two servers. It could even be supported by a single server--for example, in hospitality environments. However, in the case of deployments with small and medium telcos, it would be more advisable to have two servers--simply for the sake of redundancy, as well as for optimal usage of the CPU's. This way, the service provider can have one CPU handling the content management and delivery, while the other CPU is handling service delivery requests from end-users, as well as distribution of content. If one CPU was doing all of these things, it could have an effect on performance for the end-user.

[itvt]: What kinds of browsers does ViewCore work with?

Levy: ViewCore currently works with both ANT and Internet Explorer browsers.

[itvt]: My understanding is that you provide various applications along with your middleware, correct?

Levy: IPTV is not only a technology but a venue for rich services. We provide applications for EPG, PVR, pay-per-view and VOD, and games-on-demand. We also have API's that allow us to integrate third-party applications. For example, if an operator wants a caller-ID app, there's no problem integrating the application within our software; the same goes for billing and CRM applications. The actual integration may be carried out by Infogate or a third party--it depends on the project at hand. In addition, we provide consultancy services for applications. We partner with leading IPTV solution vendors and recommend those applications which we believe to be most applicable for the service provider.

[itvt]: Now, you don't provide content aggregation services to your customers, do you?

Levy: No. We don't provide content ourselves. However, as I mentioned, we provide consultancy services when building IPTV solutions for our customers. Our consultants assist the client by a) identifying the content that is available to them, and b) providing them direction in closing deals with the content providers. We have numerous alliances with a range of content aggregators and providers; and we are happy to assist, provide advice and direct the customer to the content they require.

[itvt]: How many customers do you have in the US?

Levy: As of right now, we have three customers in the US, two of which--Citizens Cablevision and Scott County Telephone Cooperative--have deployed ViewCore commercially, and one of which is in trials. We expect to more than triple this number by end of the current quarter.

[itvt]: How many international customers do you have?

Levy: Internationally, we have another four customers, of which three have commercially deployed and one is in trials; they include Vodatel in Croatia, and 012 Golden Lines in Israel--and we are expecting deployment with a leading Indian telco by the end of the third quarter.

[itvt]: Which is the largest deployment to date?

Levy: Our largest deployment to date is with 012 Golden Lines in Israel. 012 is an ISP with a network reaching several hundred thousand subscribers, out of which about 80,000 are subscribers to their 012 IPTV services.

[itvt]: Are any of your customers offering VOD?

Levy: No, not yet. It seems that the requirements of the small and middle tier telcos are not there yet. When we've suggested it to the tier 2 and tier 3 telcos we have spoken to, their response has been, "You know what, Daniel? I'd like to offer it, but I have two problems: one, I don't really know whether the business model is there, and two, have you seen how much it would cost me, as a 15,000-subscriber telco, to get rights for video?" So they tend to be more interested in pay-per-view than in VOD.

[itvt]: What's next on your product roadmap for ViewCore?

Levy: We are in the process of integrating with different value-added services providers, so as to be able to offer our customers an array of additional paying services such as games, chat, email, etc. Even though the market is still at a level where service providers are primarily concerned about quality of service and reliability, we know that in the very near future these value-added services will become a common part of the bouquet of services offered by service providers.

[itvt]: What, in your opinion, will be the most significant issues to impact the IPTV market over the coming year or two?

Levy: I believe that the most significant issues that will impact the IPTV market in the near future will be the speed and breadth of fiber deployment, the easier availability of content, and the maturation of IPTV solutions so that they provide the quality-of-service telcos are expected to deliver. Those three factors seem to me to be the major cornerstones that will accelerate the adoption and deployment of IPTV across the US. I suspect we will also see small but increasing numbers of pioneering cable companies hedging their bets for the future by piloting IPTV deployments in parallel to their traditional DVB-based services. The results of these pilots may have a major impact on the technology that will be adopted by cable companies two to three years from now.

URL: http://www.infogate.com

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