(Found this searching Occupy CA on Twitter)

From OCAP:
December 8th, 2009 – Today, starting at 11:30am, members of the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and more than 150, to at
times 250 people, who are struggling to survive on Ontario Works and ODSP occupied the 12th floor and main lobby of Toronto’s Metro Hall – the head of Welfare bureaucracy in Toronto.

Despite intimidation, the group refused to leave and instead demanded the right to have their Special Diet forms properly processed. The group was loud and determined – chanting “We won’t be quiet ’till we get the special diet!”. Social Services responded by vaguely telling the group that they are waiting on ‘clarification’ from the Province on policy around the Special Diet. They then issued an ultimatum and sent in a large team of police, including ETF, who were preparing to mass arrest and physically remove people from the building. After
almost 4 hours, the group was forced to exit the building. But this
fight is not over – the group from today has vowed to return with an even larger number of supporters.

The City of Toronto is responsible for administering social
assistance, and people in this city are currently being denied their right to receive the Special Diet Benefit. Current Provincial policy states that any medical provider can fill out special diet forms. However, the City of Toronto has decided arbitrarily to refuse to process Special Diet forms from Dr.Roland Wong. In doing this they are refusing to follow Provincial policy and are denying access to essential money for hundreds of families on social assistance in this city.

This comes at a time when more people than ever are being forced to
live on welfare in Ontario because of massive job loss and a
floundering financial system. People on Social Assistance are forced to live on income levels that do not allow them pay their rent and feed their families properly. Welfare offices do all they can to deny even the small benefits people are supposed to get.

We suspect that threats to the Special Diet at this time are a scary sign of cuts to come to social services in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’. The recent Auditor General’s report has served to feed the climate in which such cuts can be made. This supposedly ‘arms length public watch dog’ has timed his tired old allegations of widespread ‘welfare abuse’ to help the McGunity Government attack people on social assistance and, in particular target the Special Diet. This program has enabled people to reclaim a part of what Harris took from them and what McGuinty has withheld – and it must be defended at all costs.

It is clear that we are are in a crucial time as we face potential
cuts. If we are not prepared to fight back, we can be sure that our
situation is about to get a whole lot worse. We need to build even
stronger resistance – we need new members to work with us to fight for what we all need. Please come to a meeting and get involved. Help build the fight back.

So my research has taken me into the area of re-gentrification and it is fascinating and quite sad.

Here is an excerpt from the article Public or Private? The Pope Squat and Housing Struggles in Toronto published in Social Justice Journal written by Ute Lehrer and Andrea Winkler in 2006.

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WHEN IN THE SUMMER OF 2002 THE WORLD*S MEDIA ATTENTION WAS ON TORONTO, thanks to the visit of Pope John Paul II, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) used this moment to draw attention to their fight against poverty and homelessness in Canada’s largest city. With relatively wide support from other activist groups, this direct action group squatted in a house in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood and created a lively counter-public sphere. The squatters were evicted from the building after three months, but this direct action succeeded insofar as it drew attention to, and raised critical awareness of, the housing crisis in Toronto. It also questioned the dominant ideology about what is public and what is private, and laid open the contradictions of a neoliberal political framework that takes many forms. In this sense, though OCAP responded with direct actions to place-specific conditions, it raised questions that transcend the local level. Therefore, this direct action group can be situated within the context of anti-poverty and anti-homelessness groups and within the broader scope of social movements fighting against global capitalism.

……Gentrification, which is occurring in several Toronto neighborhoods, has captured the interest of a range of urban scholars (Bourne, 1992; Caulfield, 1994; Filion, 1991; Ley, 1996). Parkdale-currently Toronto’s most studied case of gentrification and the site of the Pope Squat-was a very wealthy neighborhood before World War II (Filey, 1996). It offered comfortable Victorian and Edwardian houses on large lots, in close proximity to the waterfront and with easy access to one of the first streetcar lines in Toronto. Construction of an inner-city highway, however, cut off the privileged location near the waterfront and a large stock of housing fell victim to high-rise redevelopment. By the 1960s, Parkdale had lost almost all of its former glory. Real estate prices plunged, leading to speculative activities by absentee landlords and investment firms. Large homes, former “mansions,” were converted into rooming houses or what the media called “illegal bachelorettes,” which were rented to low-income immigrants and poor people. The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients from the Queen Street Center for Addiction and Mental Health in the early 1980s brought more than 1,000 ex-psychiatric patients into the Parkdale neighborhood, adding to the already strong presence of single households in the neighborhood (Dear and Wolch, 1987; Simmons, 1990). In the 1990s, the neighborhood was continually stigmatized as a place of decline and decay, and the media published highly unfavorable reports and images about the neighborhood’s appearance. Stories were published on crack houses, prostitutes, and mental patients in a “little ghetto of misery” where “children are afraid to play outside” (Slater, 2004a: 313). This stigmatization helped to keep property values very low for a considerable time.

Gentrification pressures have increased since the late 1990s and Parkdale has become a trendy place, with hip bars, galleries, and boutiques. So far, neighborhood redevelopment strategies have been primarily individual efforts, not largescale ones, as was the case elsewhere. Indeed, a coalition of anti-poverty activists, rooming house landlords, and tenants became active and termed city efforts to encourage upgrading “social cleansing”; they also criticized the city’s zoning and building bylaws for driving poor people into the streets (Lyons, 1998; 2000; Weinberg, 2000).

This neighborhood is unique in the city: half the occupied dwellings were built before 1946 (the ratio city wide is one to five), and the rate of tenants is three times higher than for owners (the ratio citywide is close to one to one). Unlike other neighborhoods, where gentrification proceeded very rapidly once it began, Parkdale seems to be resisting a quick transformation of its socioeconomic conditions and its physical appearance. It features a mix of housing types, land uses, and social groups; it is home to many low-income residents and especially to single households, but also to an economically vulnerable and socially creative arts community, as well as to a steady and alarming increase of affluent professionals. Some would say a “place” like Parkdale epitomizes the kind of urban setting that attracts the “creative class” (Florida, 2002) and that it relies on “place” to foster innovation and economic development. Market mechanisms suggest that the current mix and balance will not be maintained for long and will succumb to competitive real estate pressures for increased gentrification. The newcomers are arguably already winning the “gentrification war” (Lyons, 2000) by pushing out low-income tenants and replacing them with a “fabulous transformation: a four-star hotel, executive apartments, townhouses, condos, and new family homes” (Ibid.).

At the NCTA Cable Show in Washington, DC Monday, US cable industry research, development and standardization body, CableLabs, and Canoe Ventures–the company that is implementing Project Canoe, the US cable industry’s initiative to create a national unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising (it is backed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House)– announced a new draft reference architecture specification that is designed to further the development of advanced cable advertising products.

Dubbed Advanced Advertising 1.0, the new specification is comprised of a set of component specs and standards that CableLabs and Canoe Ventures say will individually allow cable operators to offer more innovative advertising, such as interactive TV ads, VOD advertising and advanced forms of addressable advertising. Brought together in the new Advanced Advertising 1.0 spec, the partners claim, these components will collectively allow MSO’s to offer such advanced advertising products with consistent technologies, metrics and interfaces across a national footprint.

The new spec was developed, and will be maintained by, a CableLabs Working Group comprised of technical leads from the MSO’s, Canoe Ventures and CableLabs itself, with what CableLabs and Canoe Ventures describe as “selective input” from the vendor community. “We are pleased to see this specification released,” Canoe Ventures CTO, Arthur Orduna, said in a prepared statement. “In supporting the specifications, MSO’s can present a unified package of capabilities, built upon their two-way infrastructure, which advertisers can more easily buy, use and measure. With this development, we’re closer to achieving Canoe’s goal of improved accountability and measurability that marketers expect from digital media.” Added Don Dulchinos, SVP of advanced platforms at CableLabs: “Advanced Advertising 1.0 is the logical culmination of the work of MSO and vendor specialists who have been developing numerous enabling technologies for advanced advertising over the past several years. And some of this technology also can support individual MSO product offerings in the advertising space.”

The components of the new Advanced Advertising 1.0 spec include:
1) Specifications: a) ETV, a CableLabs-developed specification that is designed to enable interactive TV applications to run on low-resource legacy set-top boxes. Based on the Enhanced Television Binary Interchange Format (EBIF), ETV is part of the OCAP specification, which means that advertising applications written for ETV can run on OCAP. b) VOD Metadata 2.0, a CableLabs-developed specification for descriptive data associated with a package of VOD content (note: the content could be, for example, a movie or a long-form commercial). This metadata is used in MSO and programmer VOD systems today, but, according to CableLabs and Project Canoe, will in the future help enable the delivery of ad products for the VOD space and the addition of greater addressability to different types of ads.
2) Interfaces (there are currently four interfaces for advanced advertising, targeting EBIF, that are in the early draft phase but that will be added to the Advanced Advertising 1.0 spec, CableLabs and Canoe Ventures say): a) Service Measurement Summary Interface (SMSI), which enables MSO’s to export information about the execution of a campaign; b) Interactive Fulfilment Summary Interface (IAF), which provides a means for messaging generated by an interactive application to be exposed to an external entity; c) Interactive Application Messaging Platform (IAM), which provides an interface between interoperable applications (i.e. apps distributed to more than one MSO) and MSO systems, defining the common form of messages instantiated by interoperable apps and how MSO systems decode them; d) Campaign Information Package Interface (CIP), which provides information to the MSO’s about the configuration of application messaging processing, such as identifiers relevant to the messages.
3) SCTE standards that the CableLabs Working Group has decided should be supported as part of Advanced Advertising 1.0: a) SCTE-35, which enables measurement, enhanced applications and ad placement on linear on-demand content (also includes related support from SCTE-30, -67 and -104); b) SCTE-130, which separates new addressable ad delivery systems from ad decision systems that allow for dynamic ad selection for interactive, linear and on-demand content.

Canoe Ventures and CableLabs have launched a Web site that contains additional information on the new Advanced Advertising 1.0 spec: http://www.advancedadvertising.tv. The partners claim that there is already strong vendor support for key elements of Advanced Advertising 1.0–evidenced by an interoperability event held by CableLabs last November, in which 15 companies (Arris, BIAP, BlackArrow, Concurrent, Ensequence, Front Porch, Invidi, Microsoft, Motorola, OpenTV, Sigma Systems, Tandberg Television, This Technology, UniSoft and Visible World) demo’d interoperability among their products, based on the integration of the SCTE-130 standard with the ETV/EBIF standard.

[itvt]’s Tracy Swedlow recently interviewed Bill Sheppard, chief digital media officer of the Client Software Group at Sun Microsystems. Audio of the interview is below, followed by a transcript that has been slightly edited for length.

Sheppard explains why Sun is bullish on tru2way; provides an overview of the new JavaFX language and its significance to the interactive and broadband TV spaces; discussed interactive TV projects currently underway on Java.net; outlines his view of the future relationship between tru2way and Blu-ray; and much, much more.

To listen to the interview, click here:

Swedlow: The name of your group is the Client Software Group, but you called it something the other day…

Sheppard: Java software is what we are tending towards now.

Swedlow: There’s so much to talk about. tru2way is very much in the news. Before we go into what is happening with that technology, can you give me an understanding of your responsibilities and what your group does, just so we can provide that kind of context.

Sheppard: Sure. I’m part of the group at Sun that owns and manages Java technology. Sun invented that back in the mid- to late-’90’s. My responsibility is really to drive the business and strategy around Java in television and other digital media devices, such as Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, portable media players, and other devices that it might find its way into.

I work with the cable operators, the movie studios, the device manufacturers, the content-authoring-tool companies, pretty much anyone who’s in the ecosystem of developing interactive television applications and services and trying to push that ecosystem forward. I’ve been doing that for over 11 years now. Two weeks after I joined Sun in late ‘97, we held a set-top summit where a bunch of the companies who, at the time, were active in this, including Disney and General Instruments–which is now Motorola–and OpenTV…These companies and some others came to Sun. They’d heard about this Java thing and they felt that it might make sense as a platform for interactive television. Starting from there, we went off, created a specification–Java TV–and then started working with standards bodies including DVB and CableLabs and others.

11 years later, finally, we’ve got something on the order of 25 million set-tops and devices out there running Java. That number should increase dramatically over the next few years as Blu-ray continues to show very rapid growth. tru2way, IPTV, all of the markets now are developing nicely. Here at 10-plus years later, we’re finally seeing the adoption and the innovation in applications and services which we all had been looking for for a long time.

Swedlow: So many technologies for interactive TV have come and gone and this was introduced, as you said, 10-plus years ago. In light of the recent announcement of massive layoffs from Sun, this is still obviously a working group. This is still something that seems to be a priority for Sun.

The two-part question is: Why do you think that this technology for Sun has had such staying power, and are you surprised that they are continuing to support that in light of the recent layoffs?

Sheppard: I’m not surprised, because it’s very visible that the market is now tipped, and Blu-ray is a success by most standards, and tru2way is now in the marketplace. So we had a number of years…Four or five years ago, it was a little more tenuous, where it wasn’t clear that cable would ever actually deploy OCAP. I’ll use the terms “OCAP” and “tru2way” interchangeably.

Swedlow: Believe me, we’ve all wondered whether or not it was actually going to launch for years. Just last week, Mark Hess announced at CTAM that they already had boxes in the field but that they would be there by the end of the year…millions and millions of enabled boxes. But that was for EBIF. That wasn’t necessarily for tru2way. You said you already have 25 million enabled set top boxes. Are those boxes ready to work?

Sheppard: They’re in the field. So, of that, roughly 15 million are Blu-ray players, including the PS3. The other 10 million are various OCAP or MHP or GEM-IPTV…They’re all alphabet soup…They’re all members of the same family of Java-based global TV standards.

Swedlow: So that’s international distribution…?

Sheppard: Right. Korea, for instance, most people have digital TV there, have a Java-based set top box, whether it’s satellite, cable, or over-the-air, or IPTV. Italy, 90% of the population in Italy gets over-the-air TV and the government has made MHP…Multimedia Home Platform, the original Java-based standard, has been made the standard environment for the government to deliver applications and services to the population in Finland, Germany, Spain, and France. So you’ve got bits and pieces around the world, but the actual interesting volume is going to come from the US, now that cable has finally started.

So within Sun, I think the commitment to see this through has been in part looking at the mobile phone market where, now, 90% of all handsets in the world shipped today include a Java VM. That’s incredible reach for developers for applications, so that’s literally billions and billions of phones…

[For instance] every BlackBerry is inherently a Java device–not just capable of running Java, but the OS is Java. All the other phones–the free featured phones in China and Russia up to smartphones, whether running Windows Mobile or Symbian or Palm–Java is on 90% of them. That’s hugely important from a developer standpoint and for Sun because it gives us the ability to help be on the leading edge of that innovation.

So, what do application developers require? How can we provide the software infrastructure to support that? We recognize that TV is in a position to follow the mobile phone market. So, given the standards that are in place, over time it won’t be 90% but it’s certainly reasonable to assume that the majority of TV’s in the US would be Java-based–and in the rest of the world. Large, large numbers–hundreds of millions–of TVs globally. That’s a pretty attractive market to have your software be a part of…

Swedlow: How long will it take us to reach that point where it really is going to pay off for you? Or is it already paying off for you if you’re working with the cable operators now?

Sheppard: It pays the bills right now. Sun’s business model today is…most of the devices which have a VM, we get a small royalty–measured in cents, not dollars–for that device. There are 100 million TV’s sold annually in the US, so if tru2way were in half of those, then that’s a reasonable…Again, it keeps the lights on.

For Sun, the important revenue comes from selling the infrastructure: selling the servers, the software, the databases and all that. Virtually every application you can think of on your TV is going to require a lot of backend technology to support it.

Think of interactive advertising. If Ford puts a commercial on the air and wants you to be able to click a button and have information sent to you or have a coupon sent to you that you can take for a free rental car or something, there’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure required to allow the cable operator, Ford, the local dealer and all the parties involved to know who you are, and make that experience available to you, without compromising your privacy at the same time. That requires all sorts of identity management software, the servers to run that, the confederated management of a Comcast database versus Ford’s database…

There aren’t that many companies that make servers. There aren’t that many companies that make databases. For example, BDLive.com is a site that will host a lot of the content for Blu-ray discs. The new Neil Young disc coming out, for instance–his archives collection is due in January. Every time you put in one of those discs, you may see a message on the screen that says, “New Photos, New Videos. Click here to accept,” and it will download that to your persistent storage and that will become a part of the experience. There needs to be a bunch of hosting infrastructure to support that, so BDLive.com is a site that the studios could use, or content providers could use, to host that and to provide the Web services that the disc content needs to get that. We are hosting BDLive.com so it’s running on Sun infrastructure. They can use our application servers and databases and that sort of thing to actually build that infrastructure, but we’re not doing the specialized application work. That stuff is running on top of our more generic platforms.

By the same token, for advanced advertising, there are companies in this space who do specific advertising work to do the addressable ads or to allow the different triggers and things that you need to actually allow a viewer to interact. We don’t do that level of software, but that all requires the infrastructure which would use that. So it’s very much a partnership arrangement.

Swedlow: It’s a Blu-ray story–very important–but I actually want to discuss cable, the specific tru2way efforts. There’s a lot of attention being paid to EBIF, which is a technology which people are assuming is going to be out first, and then when boxes are more ready, that tru2way will support more advanced applications. Canoe Ventures is now starting to really be public about what they’re doing. Are you working with them? They’ve been public about their focus on EBIF, but are they going to be part of the tru2way family and what are you doing with them?

Sheppard: Canoe has certainly talked about standards like tru2way being critical to their ability to deliver the advertising experiences that they were created for. EBIF today makes sense because you’ve got something between 30 million and 40 million set-tops out there in the US, the vast majority of which are not tru2way but are capable of supporting EBIF. So if you’re going to put something in the market today, EBIF is your best chance to do that in a way which can be deployed to a critical mass of people.

tru2way is approaching two million out in the US today, mostly on Time Warner. Comcast is now working with Panasonic. If you live in Chicago or Denver, you can go to Circuit City or Ultimate Electronics or other retailers and buy a 42- or 50-inch Panasonic plasma TV which has tru2way built in, hook it up to your cable connection, plug in a CableCARD, and it will look and act exactly as one of their set-top boxes would, including the ability to see their guide, order pay-per-view, video-on-demand, all the other services they can provide. But those numbers aren’t anywhere near what EBIF can support and there’s still a lot to learn about tru2way, because it just hasn’t been widely deployed yet and most of the operators have not yet deployed it.

From Canoe Ventures’ standpoint, it makes sense to initially target EBIF, and EBIF will run well on tru2way. So starting with that and doing the basics, taking advantage of the basic capabilities of EBIF, then building on that to deliver a more elaborate experiences that tru2way can support as you have a critical mass of boxes out there is, I think, an approach that makes a lot of sense.

Swedlow: [Is this new breed of standalone set-top boxes--i.e. set-top boxes that connect to the Internet rather than a cable service--from companies such as ZeeVee and Sezmi, going to incorporate Java technology?]

Sheppard: The newer what I’ll call over-the-top boxes–ones that primarily connect to the Internet and then your TV and provide that Internet media experience on your TV–generally today are not running Java in part because it is purely an Internet box. If you look at sites like Hulu or YouTube, they are generally using Flash on the PC as a way of delivering that video experience. In most cases, they’re just taking the stream directly and not running Flash either and wrapping their own user interface around that.

There was certainly an interest at the NewTeeVee conference last week. There was a VP from Disney who said one of the challenges for them in delivering to devices is that there aren’t a lot of standards once you move beyond the cable set-top box. So that’s one of the areas where I think there’s a lot of opportunity. For Sun, it’s to take the work we’ve done in tru2way and Blu-ray, and take that Java platform, move that into these other devices.

One of the key pieces of technology I think that will make that a lot easier is JavaFX, which we’ll be releasing next month…JavaFX is a rich environment, analogous to Flash or Silverlight on the PC, which really targets the much more creative community as opposed to the hardcore developer community. Your average Flash developer doesn’t probably know how to write code, whereas an average Java developer today does need to write code. JavaFX is a cross-platform layer on top of Java that is in preview now. It will be released for the desktop on December 2nd, released for mobile early next year at Mobile World Conference in March, I believe. Then for TV…

Swedlow: TV of Tomorrow Show?

Sheppard: It won’t be ready by this year’s TV of Tomorrow Show.

Swedlow: Why don’t we show something anyway?

Sheppard: Maybe TV of Tomorrow in 2010.

Swedlow: No, you need to have a little alpha preview…

Sheppard: I’ll see what we can do. What JavaFX will do is sit on top of Java that’s already in the box and provide a scripting language which is much more accessible for the creative community–but more importantly, work with the full suite of workflow tools that you usually see in this space, the Adobe Creative Suite, Illustrator, that kind of tool.

The developers who today might be using Flash or Flex would be able to develop to JavaFX, but they get the best of both worlds. They get this rich environment on top that’s easy to develop to, but it’s fully integrated with the Java VM underneath. There are many things that Flash is not very good at. It can be very difficult to write certain types of applications in Flash because it was designed as a presentation engine. Java is a much more general-purpose VM so there’s really no limitation on what you can create.

Having FX on top and then the VM underneath makes it possible to do a lot of the heavy lifting under the covers while creating this great user experience on top. That’s a very long-winded way of saying that that’s the perfect environment for the Hulus of the world to target, across the desktop and the mobile phone and the TV set-top box, with a very similar user experience that builds in all the aspects that they’re presenting.

Swedlow: Are you saying that this is an application that runs on tru2way so that Hulu could develop to a tru2way-enabled box? Or is this a completely different platform?

Sheppard: FX can sit on top of tru2way, so FX is essentially a runtime environment that can run on an existing VM. It’s absolutely possible to put that on top of tru2way. Again, we’re speaking about where we intend to go. Today it’s not sitting there so it wouldn’t be likely that Hulu would start authoring that.

In fact, the Adobe MAX conference is going on a few blocks down the street as we speak, and we are one of the sponsors, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect: Sun Java sponsoring the Adobe Flash conference.

Swedlow: Why are you sponsoring it?

Sheppard: Because it’s a great opportunity to talk to the developers who are in that world and demonstrate what we think is a better environment. Once it’s proven itself in the eyes of the developers, which we think will happen very quickly after launch, it becomes a very compelling story. Java is deployed on essentially the same number of desktops as Flash, but it’s been considered kind of a clunky, heavier-weight environment. As of the latest release, and with FX, it’s much leaner, start-up times are much slower, and it offers some really interesting abilities like just dragging an application out of the browser onto the desktop, and it becomes completely separated from the browser.

Swedlow: You said start-up times are slower. Did you mean start-up times are faster?

Sheppard: Faster. Yes. Think of any time you have a Flash thing within a Web page: occasionally, there’s a control there where you can pop it out of the Web page or at least put it into its own window. More often than not, it’s kind of stuck to the browser. There are a lot of times where I’d love to take a media player that comes in on top of Flash and get that out of the browser, put it up in the corner of the screen, and then leave the rest of the space for doing whatever I’m doing. With FX, that just automatically is there. You can just grab it right out of the browser onto the desktop, whether or not it was specifically designed to do that.

Things like that will make it a very compelling environment for the over-the-top TV experience, and leveraging the fact that Java is already in all these mobile phones and on these PC’s and will be in so many TV’s makes that, I think, the path of least resistance.

Swedlow: I’m not here to help you form your strategy, but Flash is popular; there are a lot of people out there who know how to develop it. If somebody wanted to combine the benefits of JavaFX with maybe something that has already been developed in Flash, some legacy assets or something like that, why not be able to incorporate it?

Sheppard: There are some tools out there. I recently saw that a tool was released for Blu-ray authoring that you author in Flash and this tool converts the Flash code into Java code and gives you a complete BD-J application. Usually with that kind of solution, there’s a performance hit, so I don’t know from a practical standpoint whether you can author with complete freedom in the Flash environment and then expect everything to work just as you had authored it, or whether there are limitations from a performance standpoint that mean you have to really constrain yourself. We think the best of the Flash community is the authoring experience, and we thought that the limitation of the Flash environment is the runtime player in the device. What we’re trying to do is basically provide that authoring experience that Flash provides, but put it on top of a more robust, more powerful VM and one that happens to be in billions and billions of devices already.

Swedlow: That’s great to know. I’m glad to hear about that new development, obviously want to track that. Let’s go back to something we have already announced or we discussed in our newsletter, which is the Java.net community. Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on there, the kinds of interactive TV applications that people are tooling around with? Obviously it’s still in an incubation mode, I would think, to some extent, but there are other applications that are seeing their way into Blu-ray players. Then let’s move onto Blu-ray after that.

Sheppard: Java.net is intended to be a general-purpose hosting site for any sort of open source project that anyone wants to develop. If you think of SourceForge, which is where there’s a tremendous number of great applications and projects, Java.net is the equivalent environment for Java-based applications or technologies. We host the open source VM itself at Java.net, so one of the projects is called phoneME. We have open-sourced the entire VM and anyone can go take that code and do whatever they want with it as long as they abide by the GPL license requirements for that.

Swedlow: What does ME stand for?

Sheppard: Mobile Edition. The project where that code is hosted is phoneME. It’s phoneME, but that’s also the same VM used for TV. We have a couple different communities for TV developers at Java.net. One is HD Cookbook. HD Cookbook was started by Bill Foote. He’s one of the co-authors of the High Definition DVD and Blu-ray Cookbook, which is the first book that was published that gave authoring guidance for how to go off and build content for HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Unfortunately, the HD-DVD portion of the book is now completely obsolete, since Toshiba and Microsoft have abandoned that technology.

Bill started HD Cookbook as a Java.net project, and then we assigned a team of developers at Sun to go off and create a set of tools and scripts and documentation so that anyone can go off and author Blu-ray code–not have to go off and buy any sort of commercial tools, not have any outlay, but just download NetBeans, or you could use Eclipse. There’s a bunch of tools if you’re doing code signing and setting up the directories in a way that the Blu-ray players require the disc to recognize the format. We’ve got code there that allows you to burn just one disc, since CD media is still fairly expensive. Rather than burning a disc every time you want to try something out, they created an environment where you burn a disc, put an application on it, and then that application will connect to the Internet and you can put your actual code at a Web site, and the Blu-ray player will suck that down over the Internet rather than having to burn a new disc every time.

There are a lot of different tools and an active developer forum where people are asking questions about how do I do this? what does this part of the spec mean?–that sort of thing. HD Cookbook is enabling today the Blu-ray developer community to go off and innovate, figure out what’s possible, and just play with it and create new things.

Swedlow: Are we seeing anything they’re doing that takes advantage of the greater amount of real estate on the screen, the capability of the bandwidth of HD?

Sheppard: A lot of that community is actually part of the professional authoring community. A lot of what’s going on there is finding its way into major releases. One of the big pieces we have there is GRIN, which is the graphical interactivity framework–so it’s a whole scene-graph kind of environment for building menus and other on-screen graphics without having to write a bunch of low-level code. So that has found its way into a number of commercially released titles. Again, that’s all open source, so anyone can just use that as they see fit…

Another Java.net project which is pretty interesting is sponsored by CableLabs. They’re in the process of working with us and others to create an OCAP or tru2way reference implementation, the idea being that you’ll have a full PC-based OCAP environment that anyone can download. Then you can develop apps against that and run them on your PC.

Also, most of that environment will be available in source code, so if you are a TV manufacturer or set-top manufacturer and you want to start porting tru2way to your device but you’re not ready to enter into a commercial agreement with one of the middleware providers, you can grab this source code and port it on your own and get well down the road to developing a commercial implementation of tru2way or OCAP. It’s designed to be an enabler for tru2way and again, kick start…sort of the catalyst for the market to give developers more access to the platform itself, give the device manufacturers more access to the implementation, and ease how you get these things into the market. That’ll be on the OpenCable Java.net project.

There are also message forums there, and other tools for developing OCAP code…There’s other stuff at the OpenCable project for developers today, but the actual reference implementation itself will not be there. JavaOne would be an ideal time to make it available if that can happen, which is in May this year.

Swedlow: Several months down the road…

Sheppard: Yes, but not too many…There have been developer contests hosted there as well. There was an OCAP developer contest last year from CableLabs, and, several years before that, one from Sun. There was a Blu-ray developer contest a couple years ago. Java.net is an obvious place to host that kind of thing as well.

Anyone can create their own Java.net project. This isn’t just something that we or some other major entity has to create, but anyone with an idea can go off, create a Java.net project, and start to form a community around what they’re doing…

Swedlow: Let’s move on to Blu-ray. Blu-ray isn’t necessarily an obvious interactive TV platform and that’s traditionally been investigated or welcomed into that community, but it is. It really is… What’s happening with Blu-ray? Is it making some kind of transition?

Sheppard: Java is part of every Blu-ray player. It has to be in the player itself regardless of whether it’s a network-connected device or a non-network-enabled player. The disc itself might use Java or might not. The first year or so, there were only three titles released which actually used Java. All of the others used HDMV which is the scripting environment for Java, which is designed to be better than the DVD scripting but nowhere near as capable as BD-J.

It took a long time for those first few discs to be released, because you didn’t have much in the way of tools, you didn’t have a lot of expertise, so it was a lot of pain. Frankly, at that point, the studios were a little bit unsure whether this was going to work, because putting a full Java environment, a riched-out environment, in the player was tremendously more complex than anything that had been done in the past.

It took time, but looking at today, we’re two years and a few months into the format and virtually every major title is now released as a Java title. The authoring companies like Deluxe Digital Studios, who do a lot of authoring for Disney and the other major studios, tell me that they can author a Java-based title faster than they can author a script-based title because they’ve now developed these great libraries of code.

If they build a particular menuing effect or some sort of network access for one title, they can immediately re-use that for the second title and all the ones after that, because Java’s inherently object-oriented. It just lends itself to that kind of re-use and modularization. With a scripting environment, it’s much more difficult to do that, because you don’t have that natural architecture.

Virtually every major title now is released as a Java title, and they’re starting to get a lot more creative with the things they’re doing. The first few titles that were released–they used Java to do semi-interesting menus, but really it was just eye candy. Fox, on a couple of their early titles, put a database on the discs so you could scroll through by keywords or actors. You could bring up the database and click on “explosions,” and it would build a playlist for you of every scene in the movie where a building explodes; or every scene in a particular location or with a certain actor. Maybe mildly amusing but not probably something that’s going to convince someone to buy a Blu-ray player instead of a standard DVD player.

If we look more recently, you’ve got much more elaborate use of this. Disney released “Sleeping Beauty” last month. That was their first BD-Live title and their first platinum title [to be released on Blu-ray]. Disney has a couple dozen movies that are platinum titles. They put them in the vault. They only release them once every 10 years or so, and when they do, it’s a big deal. “Sleeping Beauty” was the first platinum title they’ve released on Blu-ray. It has a ton of extra features in it to really draw their target demographics into the movie.

When you put in the disc, you see Cinderella’s castle as the main feature of the menu and you can choose which is your favorite Disney location…You can set in your preferences your favorite Disney theme park: Disneyland, Disneyworld, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo…The weather on-screen will reflect the weather at the park that you’ve chosen. If Anaheim is your favorite Disney property, if it’s nighttime, it’ll be dark; if it’s daytime, it’ll be light; if it’s cloudy, if it’s raining, we’ll see all those things on the screen.

I don’t know if this feature actually made it on to the disc; if not, I think you’ll see it in the future: If you’ve been to a Disney property and they took your picture going down Splash Mountain or whatever, then you can go into a certain room in Cinderella’s castle and you’ll see the picture on the wall that they took of you.

Another feature that’s definitely on the disc: if I’m going on a business trip, I can record a video to a Disney Web site with my webcam, upload that, and then when my daughter, the next day after I’ve left, puts in “Sleeping Beauty,” she’ll see a Post-It note on the screen that says, “Message from Daddy. Click on this to view it.” It’ll take you into another room in Cinderella’s castle and you’ll see a TV in there and the video that I recorded for her online will now show up in Cinderella’s castle in “Sleeping Beauty” on the TV…

My four-year-old–other than the fact that she hasn’t yet been exposed to the wonderful world of Disney–would find that very compelling, I think. Certainly, if every day I record a new message for her. From Disney’s standpoint, if it means she’s putting in that disc every day to see the new message from Daddy, that’s a pretty compelling value for Disney as well. It makes it much stickier.

You can extend that idea and think of all the online communities that Disney or Warner or others have. Disney has Club Penguin which is designed to be a safe community for kids to go to and play games and chat and that kid of thing. The fact that that’s hosted on a PC still carries some risk with it: if I had a 10-year-old daughter and she had a PC and I’m in another part of the house, she could certainly find her way from Club Penguin into some other less wholesome part of the Web. On the other hand, you could take that Club Penguin experience, build it as a BD-J component of every Disney release, and instead of interacting on the PC, which is not the safest environment, she could be doing it on the Blu-ray player which is completely safe because, once you put in a disc, nothing else can take over that experience. The player is owned by that disc at the moment that you put it in.

That gives Disney or whomever the opportunity to put that content in the living room instead of wherever the PC happens to be–put it on what’s probably a bigger screen in a rich-media environment and then make that part of the larger Disney community. So combining all those different Disney properties and loyalty points and…all of these things work together all on the Blu-ray player and make for what could be a very sticky platform and ultimately very profitable for Disney.

Swedlow: How well are Blu-ray players selling?

Sheppard: They are selling better than DVD players did at the same point in time. DVD was the most successful consumer release. At this point, Blu-ray is still exceeding it by most measures.

Swedlow: Do you know how many millions?

Sheppard: Yes. I’m trying to think. I believe there’s about five million standalone players worldwide and about 12 million PS3’s or something like that. A good percentage of the PS3’s are being used exclusively or heavily as Blu-ray players. You can’t really separate those two out very much.

This…will be the first holiday season where consumers aren’t confused or sitting on the sidelines because they don’t want to pick the wrong format.

In Japan, 30% of all DVD player sales are now Blu-ray–mostly recorders. In Japan, there’s a strong culture towards recording off the air, so 30% of all Blu-ray and DVD unit sales are now Blu-ray, which is a huge percentage only this far in.

Also, the prices have just dropped dramatically. Today you can find $200 Blu-ray players easily. Everyone predicts that they’ll be $150 come Black Friday and not just second-tier brands. Reports are that the Sony entry-level player, which is a great player–it’s responsive, it’s network connected–will be $179 at Sears and some other places on Black Friday.

Swedlow: To what extent can Blu-ray exist in a tru2way environment? Do they coexist? Do they layer on top of each other? How do the two work together? Can we see Blu-ray exist in an integrated set-top box where you might be able to stick a disc in, in the future, and then be able to incorporate all the benefits that a set-top box delivers…? What’s the future of those two technologies?

Sheppard: There was a huge battle when Blu-ray was being developed as to what the content layer would be. It was originally decided, before Sun was even involved, that it would be Java. Then Microsoft put on a hard lobby to try and displace Java with their HDi technology, which is a markup-based environment, kind of like a browser is specifically designed for media.

We were able to fend that off, and one of the big reasons why Java prevailed in Blu-ray is because the same Java platform that’s in Blu-ray is what tru2way is based on. So you could write content once and have that exact same content run in both places. The fact is, you probably want to tweak it a little bit because every Blu-ray player is high-def, whereas tru2way does not guarantee necessarily high-def. You’d probably want to take advantage of the higher resolution that Blu-ray can offer.

On the remote control, there are a few different buttons mandated on tru2way than mandated on Blu-ray. In reality, you’re not going to take the exact same code and put it in both places most likely, but 95%-plus of the code can be the same.

There’s a natural fit between the content communities. On the movies side, you have movie releases; typically 90 days later, they show up on DVD and on Blu-ray. Then some time after that, they show up on video-on-demand through the cable provider. Today, when you watch video-on-demand…you don’t generally see the bonus content. You just get the movie, but you don’t see the deleted scenes, the gag roll, the making of, all the other stuff. From a technical standpoint, there’s no reason with tru2way that you couldn’t take all the BD-J features, all the bonus features, and make those available through cable.

You look at all the time and effort that goes into offering something like “Iron Man,” which was out recently and was a huge success. “The Dark Knight” comes out in a few weeks and is probably expected to be the first title that sells a million copies upon its release. A lot of work goes into building that extra content for those big blockbuster titles, none of which shows up through video-on-demand. My guess is that if someone can pay $4 to watch the movie or pay $6 to watch the movie and have access to all this other stuff, a lot of people would do that. The fact that Blu-ray and tru2way are based on the same Java platform means, from an authoring standpoint, the studios don’t have to take all of that and redo it for cable. It’s already been done through Blu-ray, so virtually all of that would just move right over.

Going the other direction, I think we can agree that, a few years from now, it’s likely that shows like “Heroes” and “Lost” and “Deal or No Deal” will have some sort of interactive components on the air. You don’t generally see a season compilation disc of “Deal or No Deal” being sold, because, frankly, that’s not so compelling the second time around. “Heroes,” you certainly do have the season package and that’s a hugely popular holiday gift. If there’s interactivity that goes with the show–to find out the backstory, to play games associated with what’s going on–it would make sense that a lot of that should be able to be packaged up and put onto the Blu-ray release as well, so that you have all that extra content there, too.

Content flows both ways, from the studios over to cable, and from the TV community over to the packaged media over to Blu-ray. Having the same platform in both places makes that authoring experience much easier…

From the device standpoint, we are starting to see the worlds come together. The LG and Samsung Blu-ray players now support Netflix streaming built-in, the latest release of both those players. We also hear interest from tru2way set-top providers–so some of the major providers of cable set-tops–who are looking at putting Blu-ray into that device. Potentially, if you put a Blu-ray recorder in there, then it could be a great way to archive in full high-def the shows that you want to not have just on a hard drive.

At the same time, a lot of the same hardware and software is in the box. So the kits that are typically used to build Blu-ray players from Broadcom, from Sigma, from Intel, are the exact same chipsets you generally build a tru2way set-top or integrated TV with. It’s the same Java software stack, generally the same Unix environment, same codec support.

The difference between a Blu-ray player and a tru2way set-top is not very much, when you look at the overall amount of hardware and software in the device. You could certainly make a tru2way set-top that would only be incrementally more expensive to also be a Blu-ray player, and conversely, you could make a Blu-ray player that would only be incrementally more expensive to also be a full cable set-top.

Today, where you have the Netflix streaming client built in, potentially that’s an alternative to cable. We’ve seen the Xbox 360 being used as an IPTV client for Microsoft’s Mediaroom environment. Again, the PS3 is actually already being used as an IPTV environment in Korea for Korea Telecom. They add a small dongle through USB that has the hardware in it needed to connect to the network.

I think we’re definitely going to see this convergence where some of these devices take on multiple personalities and can support both of those environments. So the content is going to cross both markets and the devices themselves will be capable of supporting both markets.

Swedlow: I think that is a truly exciting opportunity right there.

Sheppard: It’s been a long time coming. Anything that reduces boxes in the home…Every time you add a new box, it’s new wiring, new remote control programming. One of the really compelling arguments behind the tru2way TV is you don’t need that extra box there and you don’t have to figure out which VMI versus this and that and you don’t have to program your remote twice.

Swedlow: It’s interesting that Ensequence, which is a well-known player in our industry as an ITV tools developer, came out the year before to say that they’re developing Blu-ray applications.

Sheppard: They’ve got their on-Q Studio, which is a great tool for developing multiplatform. I think they can support–in addition to OCAP–OnRamp, which is a subset of OCAP for low-end devices; they can support OpenTV, as I recall, and a few of the other environments. A year-and-a-half or two years ago, they said, “We’re also going to support Blu-ray with our tools.” And, from their standpoint, it’s not a lot of new code because, again, they can support OCAP and they’ve already got most of the core technology in there.

We’re also seeing some really powerful tools coming from the Blu-ray side of things: tools from companies like Sofatronic with Kaleidoscope and NetBlender with DoStudio; tools that are targeting the Hollywood community. But again, once you’re creating Blu-ray content, it’s a very small step to also create tru2way content. Those companies have said they plan to add on tru2way support once the market is mature enough to support that.

Swedlow: In the past, people have always felt that developing Java code required–and it still does–a large amount of effort, a lot of skill–and a lot of money, because big engineers cost quite a lot to hire. Now you’re announcing the JavaFX platform. Are you making any other initiatives to try to bring the developer base to you so that you start bringing in Internet developers who may not have those kinds of skills? Blu-ray developers are potentially part of that community, as well. How are you trying to evangelize directly to the creative community over and above the other things that you’ve mentioned?

Sheppard: A lot of its grassroots-type stuff. There are events that producers build. They had an event at Pixar last month here in the Bay Area where we had a Blu-ray panel. A number of us spoke and showed the latest content and talked about authoring. The Bay Area doesn’t have the community that LA does when it comes to movies, obviously, but you’ve got Lucas and Pixar up here, which are some pretty good names to have. So events like that, where we’re helping to educate the creative community on the capabilities that are coming, or that are here, on Blu-ray, on tru2way, and on related platforms.

JavaOne is a great place to do that. So, every spring, in May more or less, in San Francisco, we have the world’s largest developer conference: between 15,000 and 20,000 developers, mostly hardcore Java developers. But increasingly, we have more of that creative community. With products like FX and some of the developer tools that are out there, it’s attracting a larger audience from the creative side. We will certainly, with the release of FX, I think, be devoting a much bigger component of JavaOne to the TV market and the rich-media market.

We’re right now in the process of creating the tracks, and the call for papers will go out within a few weeks. We typically have to turn down way more sessions than we can accept. Last year, we did about a day-and-a-half-worth of TV-related content, and usually the session rooms are full for that. We’re looking to expand that more this year.

Also, if you look at the cable conferences like the Cable Show, which will be in April in DC, huge tru2way component to that, so you have a lot of the content community that are demonstrating new applications.

Swedlow: It’s taken a while for them to get to that place, to mention interactive TV in a sentence somewhere.

Sheppard: It has, absolutely.

Swedlow: Clearly, this is the year for them to really start doing it. I’m getting a lot of emails from people who are veterans in the business like yourself, saying with multiple exclamation points: “It’s finally hitting pay dirt!!!”…

Sheppard: Now it’s getting fun, actually being able to go to the store and see a lot of Blu-ray players. tru2way hasn’t hit the Bay Area, but it should within the next six to nine months, I think.

Swedlow: In the most wired city in the world, you would think that these kinds of things are here, but they’re not.

Sheppard: It’s getting fun, and certainly the involvement with the Hollywood community, the Emmy’s, now that there’s an interactive award. I was on the judging panel this past year for that. So that’s really rewarding to see the sorts of creativity that’s coming, as we look at all these different shows and how the creative communities are building these user experiences around the core show content. This is going to be fun for a long time.

Swedlow: Thanks very much, Bill. As always, it’s great to talk with you.

This is Tracy Swedlow, editor-in-chief of InteractiveTV Today, and we’ve been speaking to Bill Sheppard who is chief digital media officer of the Client Software Group of Sun Microsystems. You can find his work at Java.net and Sun.com. He’ll also be appearing at the TV of Tomorrow Show.

Sheppard: Absolutely.

Swedlow: March 10th and 11th. Thanks very much. Talk to you next time.

Sun Microsystems
Java.net

In this recorded episode of [itvt]’s talk radio show, “The TV of Tomorrow Show with Tracy Swedlow,” Tom Pratt, VP of programming and product development at The Weather Channel, discusses the channel’s interactive TV offerings and strategy. Topics covered include why The Weather Channel views implementing interactive TV as a high priority; the channel’s commitment to ETV/EBIF and OCAP/tru2way; its applications on DISH Network and DirecTV; the infrastructure that enables those apps; and more.

To listen to the show, click here.

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[itvt] is now offering transcripts of our radio shows. If you would like to order a transcript of this show or of one of our previous shows (listed below), please email your request to: transcripts@itvt.com. Price: $55.00 each.

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InteractiveTV Today [itvt], the first, best and most widely read news source on interactive and multiplatform television, is pleased to present the third annual TV of Tomorrow Show, March 10th-11th (Tuesday-Wednesday), 2009 in San Francisco, California at the famous Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The first two TV of Tomorrow Shows were praised by sponsors, speakers, exhibitors and attendees not only as true experts’ conferences that attracted a veritable “who’s who” of the interactive TV industry, but as offering a thoroughly unique and enjoyable experience. We are working hard to ensure that the TV of Tomorrow Show 2009–which is already attracting an array of high-powered speakers and which will feature a line-up of fascinating entertainments–is even better.
 

• To find out more about discounted early-bird registration, click here.
   
• For an extensive gallery of photos from the TV of Tomorrow Show 2007 and 2008, click here.
   
• To explore our dedicated TV of Tomorrow Show Web site, click here.
   
• To discuss the TV of Tomorrow Show, or to give us feedback and suggestions (including new technologies you would like to see showcased and topics you would like to see discussed), email us at swedlow@itvt.com.
   

–Company’s European Arm Begins Major Push for the EMEA Region

EchoStar Technologies, a subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation (note: EchoStar Corp. was spun off earlier this year from satellite-TV company, DISH Network–formerly called EchoStar–and retains the latter’s hardware business and certain of its infrastructure assets), has signed CableLabs’ tru2way Host Device License Agreement. The agreement gives EchoStar the rights to implement OCAP middleware and the CableCARD interface on devices using tru2way technology. According to EchoStar, its signing of the agreement signals its “commitment to providing innovative products and technologies to the cable industry”: earlier this year, it also announced that it was targeting the US cable industry with a CableLabs-certified DOCSIS 2.0 product dubbed the SlingModem (see [itvt] Issue 7.87 Part 2b). The US’s major cable operators have committed to supporting tru2way–a national software standard that is designed to enable two-way interactive TV services to be written once for delivery over multiple different receiving devices and cable networks–on systems covering over 90 million US homes by the end of 2008. The tru2way Host Device License Agreement is billed by CableLabs as consolidating, clarifying and providing an alternative to the organization’s existing CableCard Host Interface License Agreement (CHILA) and OpenCable Application Platform Implementer Agreement. The organization says that it is available to any consumer electronics manufacturer on a non-discriminatory basis. Among other things, the license covered by the agreement allows for self-certification and paper certification of retail devices, formal rights of participation by CE manufacturers in CableLabs processes, approval of new digital outputs via a four-studio approach, and a tru2way trademark license. “We are firmly committed to becoming a vendor of choice in the cable industry, leveraging decades of systems and manufacturing excellence and today’s announcement asserts our commitment,” EchoStar president, Mark Jackson, said in a prepared statement.

In other EchoStar news: The company’s European arm announced a major push for the EMEA market at the IBC show in Amsterdam earlier this month. EchoStar Europe, which currently supplies digital set-top boxes to a number of European operators, says that it will shortly launch a range of advanced set-tops, DVR’s and other devices for cable, IPTV, satellite and terrestrial operators throughout the EMEA region. It also says that it has strengthened its marketing team: the team, which is headed up by Rick Smith, VP of sales and marketing, also now includes sales and marketing director for advanced home devices, Karl Tempest-Mitchell; director of business development for IPTV and broadband, Ian Walker; and director of marketing and communications, Mark Goodburn. “EchoStar Europe provides EMEA’s digital television operators with advanced set-top solutions that are optimized to increase ARPU, reduce op-ex and enable operators to launch better and more advanced entertainment services,” Smith said in a prepared statement. “We are in a unique position to be able to do this. We have a talented engineering team which has been working closely with one of the world’s largest and most advanced digital, pay-TV operators to reduce opex and optimize the consumer proposition. We intend to leverage this experience to enable us to deliver equally invaluable benefits to operators throughout the EMEA market. In addition to a number of exciting advantages in set-top box monitoring–solutions to reduce engineer visits and customer contact with the operator’s call-center–we have exclusive access to EchoStar Corporation’s many assets derived from over 25 years operating in the television space, such as Sling Media, the world’s leading place-shifting technology.”

As part of its push, EchoStar Europe used the IBC show to unveil some of the advanced functionality that will be offered by its new range of set-top boxes (which it says it will begin releasing in the second quarter of next year):

1. A diagnostic system, called Set-Top Box Health, which the company says will allow operators to proactively monitor the performance of customer premises equipment, with the goal of reducing customer complaints and customer care costs. The system was developed for DISH Network and has been thoroughly field-tested on the latter’s subscribers, EchoStar says. According to the company, the system supports remote control of the set-top so that customer service representatives can control the receiver via an IP connection, navigating the user interface and changing receiver settings; this, the company says, makes it easier to solve complex customer inquiries. EchoStar also says that the system can monitor the temperature of a DVR’s hard drive and predict a failure, and then send an alert through the network so that customer care departments can respond with on-screen messages or telephone calls.
2. A customer tracking solution, which the company developed in partnership with DISH Network, and which it says tells the operator and its broadcast and advertising partners what subscribers are watching and when. According to the company, the solution’s behavioral monitoring is aggregated and anonymous, but provides demographic profiles of viewers so that advertisers know how to reach their target audience at any given time. EchoStar says that the solution can be used in cable, IPTV, satellite and terrestrial deployments, and provides such detailed information on set-top box behavior as which channels the boxes are tuned to and for how long.
3. The TV “place-shifting” functionality that is enabled by EchoStar-subsidiary, Sling Media. The functionality will be integrated into set-top boxes for cable, satellite and IPTV, EchoStar Europe says, and, in addition to enabling end-users to watch their home TV service from remote locations, can be used to enable multi-room, multi-screen TV service within the home.

In addition, as part of its push for the European market, EchoStar Europe has signed a deal with Alticast, a Korean company that specializes in MHP and OCAP technology, to integrate the latter’s DVB-MHP/GEM middleware into its set-top boxes. “It is imperative that EchoStar Europe secures the licenses necessary to meet market and technology requirements so that we may fulfil our business development plans,” EchoStar Europe’s Smith said in a prepared statement. “MHP and GEM are flavours of middleware that we must be able to offer our customers moving forward; therefore we selected Alticast as an independent provider, renowned for their high quality, stable and evolutionary software.” Added Alticast managing director, Anthony Smith-Chaigneau: “EchoStar Europe has the background and experience to grow its market position outside the United States and, given their technical experience and abilities, will be in a great position to provide market-leading set-top boxes to the broadcast and IPTV industries. We are proud to be able to offer them first-class MHP and GEM middleware to complement those products.”

–Secures Multiple EPG Deals for Latin America and Europe

Macrovision, the company that recently acquired the US’s dominant EPG developer, Gemstar-TV Guide, says that it has signed CableLabs’ tru2way (OCAP) Implementers’ Agreement, allowing it to build products based on the tru2way interactive cable architecture. The company also says that it has signed an OpenCable Contribution Agreement with CableLabs that will see it providing expertise, resources and day-to-day support toward the development of tru2way as an industry standard. tru2way is billed as providing an underlying common platform for cable operators and consumer electronics manufacturers: Macrovision claims that, as a provider of EPG technology to both the cable and CE industries, it is in a position to serve as a “valuable link” between the two, as they work on implementing tru2way. “tru2way delivers a level of simplification and control that will usher in the next generation of capabilities for digital television viewing,” Steve Shannon, Macrovision’s EVP of product management, said in a prepared statement. “We are very excited to join CableLabs in its efforts to bring tru2way to more consumers and look forward to building this technological breakthrough into more of our products.”

Macrovision says that it will incorporate the tru2way standard into its j- Guide (offers a number of advanced interactive features) and Passport (billed as enabling “simple search, navigation functions, and easy management of content”) EPG’s. In addition, the company says that its Connected Platform will provide the key DLNA technologies for CableLabs’ tru2way Home Networking Protocol.

In other Macrovision news:

• The company says it has signed a multi-year patent licensing agreement with Siemens Home & Office Communications Devices that will allow the latter to incorporate EPG’s based on Macrovision technology into its Gigaset-branded set-top boxes, which are sold in retail in the European market.
• The company says it has signed a multi-year patent licensing agreement with TechnoTrend that that will allow the latter to incorporate EPG’s based on Macrovision technology into set-top boxes distributed through retail in the European market.
• The company says it has signed multi-year agreements for its Passport EPG products with Latin American cable operators, Claro Guatemala, Claro El Salvador, Claro Nicaragua and Claro Honduras (all subsidiaries of America Movil), Cablevision Argentina, Telecentro Argentina and Videomar Brazil. The Passport product line includes Passport DCT, an EPG solution for Motorola’s DCT-series set-top boxes; Passport Echo, a high-resolution interactive application suite that is intended as an interface for HD DVR’s; various application options, such as PassTime Games and PassTime Puzzlers; QuickMenu, a configurable menu system; and an interactive video mosaic application that enables viewers to watch multiple scaled video streams on a single channel and to launch services by highlighting and selecting channels (note: Passport DCT and Passport Echo support Spanish subtitles, Latin American parental control ratings, and the ability to pre-stage set-top boxes with a Spanish EPG language setting). According to Macrovision, all its new Latin American Passport customers are using Passport DCT, Passport Echo, PassTime Games, PassTime Puzzlers and QuickMenu; and Videomar Brazil has also launched the interactive video mosaic option.
• The company says that it has extended its multi-year EPG license agreement with Sony Corporation for the European market to allow the consumer electronics giant to use technologies covered by its patents in a new product line: PlayTV, a combined TV tuner and PVR for the PlayStation3, which is scheduled to be released by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe later this year. “Macrovision is pleased to extend its relationship with Sony in Europe to cover PlayTV,” Samir Armaly, Macrovision’s SVP of patent licensing, said in a prepared statement. “This agreement demonstrates the strength and importance of Macrovision’s IPG patent portfolio on new platforms.”
• The company has teamed with Axel Springer to launch a HOERZU-branded version of its GUIDE Plus+ EPG for the German market. HOERZU, which is owned by Axel Springer, is Germany’s largest weekly TV listings magazine. In addition to HOERZU branding (which it features prominently), the new version of the guide incorporates the magazine’s listings and reviews. GUIDE Plus+ is an eight-day EPG that is built directly into such digital devices as iDTV’s, DVR’s and DVD recorders and that, according to Macrovision, has to date been integrated into over a million units deployed in the German market. The company’s partnership with Axel Springer sees a team of editorial specialists from HOERZU providing the EPG with daily recommendations on the best programs to watch in six categories: Movies, Sports, Children, Entertainment, News and Other. The HOERZU team also evaluates and rates the programs and writes reviews and synopses for the EPG. “By introducing HOERZU into the field of electronic program guides via the GUIDE Plus+ system, we have again successfully completed the transformation of a well-established brand and premier content into the digital world,” Jochen Beckmann, director of program magazines for Axel Springer, said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to working with Macrovision to deliver market-leading content and services to consumers in Germany.”

SysMedia, a UK-based company that specializes in content-management and production systems for teletext, subtitling and interactive TV, contacted [itvt] last week to let us know that it has expanded its Plasma Gold interactive content production and management system with a new output module that enables delivery to mobiles (note: according to SysMedia, Plasma Gold separates content from the way it’s presented, using a templated design, and so offers “a powerful author-once/publish-to-many solution for multiplatform content production”; the company says that the platform is compliant with OCAP, ETV/EBIF and ACAP and also supports IPTV deployments). The company says it decided to expand the platform because “the publishing of text, images and adverts to handheld devices is a growing sector). According to the company, text, images, video clips and tabular information are first manually created or derived from data feeds, and then integrated with advertising; the output is then delivered in such a way as to be formatted correctly for the different classes of mobile handset, the company says. The company also claims that, via third-party integration, the solution can offer “clear monetizing possibilities” through categorized advertising facilities. “A mobile phone is a naturally interactive device, and users engage quickly with content that is compelling, topical and can be navigated easily,” SysMedia CEO, Andrew Lambourne, explained. “By using feeds and scripts to populate the content, and by sharing the information with other platform deliveries, Plasma Gold enables customers to publish mobile content and add brand value without significantly adding to production costs. The new mobile output module for Plasma Gold increases the reach of cross-platform publishing and provides broadcasters with a fresh new way to connect audiences with their existing information. Our solution offers digital service publishers reduced costs and reduced time-to-market by eliminating bespoke development and maximizing the re-use potential of existing information.”

–Launches OCAP Development Toolkit
–Launches New Set-Top Platform Offering Media Mobility
–Secures Deals with T-Home, Ziggo

At the IBC show in Amsterdam earlier this month, Motorola unveiled various enhancements to its VOD product portfolio that make use of adaptive media management (AMM). AMM is a technology framework that is billed as creating a flexible and cost-effective platform for the delivery of such on-demand services as VOD, on-demand advertising and time-shifted TV. According to Motorola, its AMM enhancements will enable its operator customers to rapidly adapt to changing content usage patterns, while optimizing storage, streaming and network costs; and will also enable more content choice and improved service reliability for end-users.

Motorola says that the enhancements are intended to respond to the ongoing rapid growth of operators’ VOD content libraries, by addressing the fact that increased content choices mean that viewership is more widely distributed and traditional concurrency rules no longer apply. Instead of taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach to managing and storing content, the company says, its AMM implementation proactively and reactively manages the placement of content within the network and identifies and assigns the most effective streaming and storage technology (DRAM, flash, disk and network attached storage/storage area networks).

Motorola’s VOD portfolio enhancements include:

• The ODM2000 (slated for availability in Q1, 2009), an on-demand media blade that the company says is designed to improve the performance, scalability and reliability of its B-1 Video Server. It is a hybrid solid-state ingest and streaming module which supports a configurable cache of both DRAM and flash memory and which the company says is designed to support the full range of advanced video services. According to Motorola, the B-1 uses AMM to manage content and streaming between DRAM, flash memory, local and remote storage in a manner that maximizes system performance while lowering total operating costs.
• The CPS1000 cluster manager which is the first component of Motorola’s content propagation system. According to the company, it is designed to optimize storage, streaming and network resources, and improves the fault resiliency of co-located or geographically distributed on-demand elements.
• System Release 4.0 of Motorola’s on-demand solution system, of which the CPS1000 is a part. According to the company, SR4.0 features enhanced H.264 support, integration with Tandberg OpenStream 4.0, chaptering functionality for creating a DVD-like experience on VOD, and ranged playlists that enable the B-1 to insert targeted ads at any point in on-demand content.

In other Motorola news:

• The company has announced the commercial release of a toolkit, called DEVPlatform for OCAP, for creating and debugging tru2way/OCAP applications. “Motorola is committed to bringing new, innovative and interactive viewing experiences to operators’ cable systems,” Larry Robinson, Motorola’s VP of product management for digital video solutions, said in a prepared statement. “Motorola’s support for open specifications and tru2way technology enable cable companies and application developers to rapidly bring to market the innovative television applications that consumers demand.” According to Motorola, the new toolkit provides developers with both a Windows PC simulator and a commercial set-top environment. It allows developers and cable operators to load, run and debug on actual set-tops, the company says, without the need for a cable headend or any additional software licenses. It runs on Windows XP SP2 and is integrated with Motorola’s tru2way-enabled set-top box. According to materials on Motorola’s Web site, DEVPlatform for OCAP includes the following components: Standalone Windows PC developer environment; Windows-based PC simulator with virtual TV monitor, remote control, and set-top front panel; built-in section generator for generating MPEG-2 transport streams; a Motorola OCAP-enabled set-top box; Motorola OCAP middleware for both the simulator and the set-top; new project wizards for creating OCAP projects; TFTP and HTTP server software; sample applications and technical bulletins; Javadoc API references; Motorola technical support; system, design and testing services available on request.
• The company has launched a multimedia set-top platform that allows users to transfer content to and from a mobile phone, without having to use a PC. It also allows users to create and store personalized music and video libraries, Motorola says. The first implementation of the new platform will be launched November 1st by Japanese mobile wireless operator, KDDI, which is deploying Motorola set-tops equipped with the platform to power a service called au BOX. The service will allow subscribers of KDDI’s au mobile wireless service to transfer content between their home entertainment systems and their mobile devices. The Motorola set-tops will be offered to au subscribers as an option on a leased basis. Among other things, the boxes feature a CD player and CD ripping capabilities, in order to allow users to rip CD’s from their personal collections, automatically retrieve CD information, store the files in their music libraries, and then transfer them to a mobile handset or portable media player via USB. In addition, Motorola says, subscribers will be able to play music from a CD, mobile handset or portable media player on the set-top through its integrated speakers. The boxes also offer video encoding capabilities, so that viewers can upload video from a DVR and then transfer it to their mobiles; a DVD player; and the ability to access the Internet, Motorola says. The new set-top platform is based on Motorola’s KreaTV open software for set-top devices, which it acquired via its acquisition of set-top box manufacturer, Kreatel, back in 2006. According to the company, KreaTV is designed to let operators easily add new functionality and services at any time, is compatible with a wide range of OS middleware and DRM technologies, and supports multiple video formats, including H.264 HD.
• The company says that Deutsche Telekom has selected its HD-enabled VIP1616E IPTV set-top box for its Microsoft Mediaroom-powered T-Home Entertain services. According to Motorola, the box–which T-Home will brand as Media Receiver 300 Typ A–will enable T-Home customers to access a range of multimedia applications, in addition to standard TV offerings. The box will also allow those customers to access premium sports content in HD and to use its included EPG to plan their viewing and schedule recordings. It incorporates a DVR and two-way IP capability.
• The company says that Dutch cable operator, Ziggo, has selected its B-1 Video Server and its Stream Commander management software to power its new VOD service, which will offer both SD and HD content. The service launched commercially on the former Casema network in the second quarter and is scheduled to launch across the entire Ziggo network by the end of the year. The service features several thousand titles, including movies, children’s programs, documentaries and music videos, and will shortly also offer a selection of content in HD. According to Motorola, its VOD platform has now been selected by European operators that collectively pass over 8 million homes. The B-1 Video Server–which Motorola acquired via its acquisition of Broadbus (see [itvt] Issue 6.87 Part 1)–separates storage from streaming, which, the company says, allows operators such as Ziggo to independently scale content libraries and streaming resources “at a fraction of the operational costs” of legacy servers. Motorola bills the solid-state server as providing a very high-performance, scalable and reliable solution for VOD and an open platform for advanced on-demand services, such as time-shifted TV, network DVR and on-demand ad insertion.

[itvt] has learned that Geneva-based ADB Group, which acquired US
tru2way/OCAP specialist, Vidiom Systems, back in February, 2006,
has sold parts of that company’s professional services business back to
Vidiom Systems founder, Tim Wahlers. The business will form the
basis of a new company, called enableTV, which has been set up by
Wahlers and which has around 60 employees, a number of whom were
formerly employed at Vidiom.

[itvt] caught up with Wahlers Sunday morning to find out more about
the new company and its goals: “ADB offered me an opportunity to
buy back these assets,” he said. “Walden Miller [former Vidiom VP of
engineering services] and Mark Malinak [former Vidiom VP of
business development] are joining me, but Vidiom is keeping a number
of employees, including [VP of strategic initiatives] David Housman
and [VP of marketing] Mike Malcy. The assets we acquired are various
technologies and applications that were developed or licensed by
Vidiom. They include tools, such as the vCert testing technology and
the Vision Workbench application-development toolset, as well as the
iTV Dashboard application and Vidiom’s license for the ODL [OCAP
Development, LLC] OCAP stack. Our main objective will be to

develop OCAP applications–those applications won’t be tied to any
single stack, but obviously we are focusing on ODL. We hope to
expand our mission beyond just services, but in the near term, we will
be supporting OCAP, MHP, GEM and ETV/EBIF. We are developing
new tools and technologies for those standards. We will initially be
targeting our efforts at the cable industry, but we are also planning to
move into IPTV. We are currently working on the funding strategy for
the new company, and we expect to be making announcements about
this in the next few months. In addition to retaining a number of
technology assets and people from Vidiom, we have also signed an
MOU to acquire the Boulder operations of Solekai Systems, including
their testing facility and their cable services business. We’re setting up
our operations in their former facilities. We believe that OCAP is
primed for market success, and especially for retail success, and one of
the things we’ll be doing is selling the ODL OCAP stack. But until we
get closer to retail OCAP, the OCAP stack vendors are all going to be
fighting for sales to the cable operators. As it happens, a lot of the
operators aren’t that much interested in the question of stacks–they’re
just focused on the set-top boxes, and don’t care which OCAP stack
they’re using. But as we get closer to the retail availability of OCAP in
set-top boxes, a lot of opportunities are going to open up for the OCAP
stack vendors, so I think it’s looking pretty good going forward.”

Wahlers stressed that he could not comment on Vidiom’s reasons for
selling him the assets that are now the core offerings of enableTV, nor
on what Vidiom will be doing going forward. However, it is no secret
that Vidiom has been refocusing its business strategy over the past few
months: in addition to reselling OCAP, MHP and Blu-ray software
stacks from its ADB Group-stablemate, Osmosys, it has been
significantly expanding its OCAP/tru2way application testing and
integration services (which are currently being used by a very
significant customer, Comcast Media Center’s HITS AxIS, among
others), and has discontinued its application-development services.

ActiveVideo Networks (formerly ICTV) recently appointed interactive TV pioneer,
John Callahan, as its CTO. Callahan previously spent 15 years at Time Warner
Cable, where he was involved in many of the operator’s interactive TV and
VOD initiatives, and where he served most recently as SVP of software
engineering for its Advanced Technology Group. He was a significant
contributor to the creation of the Time Warner Cable Pegasus digital television
system architecture, and to such seminal interactive TV technologies and
standards as the Interactive Services Architecture (ISA), VOD, OCAP and
EBIF/ETV. He was also one of the principal developers of the network PVR
service, MystroTV, and subsequently led the transformation of that service
into Time Warner Cable’s current StartOver offering. In addition, he was
closely involved in implementing the operator’s caller ID on TV service and
its OCAP set-top navigator. Earlier in his career at Time Warner Cable,
Callahan was part of the engineering team that created and deployed the
pioneering interactive TV service, the Full Service Network.

Callahan recently spoke to [itvt]’s Tracy Swedlow about why he decided to
leave Time Warner Cable and join ActiveVideo Networks; about the projects
he plans to work on at ActiveVideo, including developing a new
programming-navigation model which he terms “never-ending navigation”
and which he says will “put content front and center”; about his view of the
current status of the US cable industry’s OCAP/tru2way and ETV/EBIF
standardization initiatives and how they relate to ActiveVideo’s technologies
and services; and much, much more.

[itvt]: Could you give us a little background on your time at Time Warner
Cable? What motivated you to leave Time Warner Cable and to join
ActiveVideo Networks?

Callahan: Well, the first thing I would say is that Time Warner Cable was
absolutely a fabulous experience for me. It was a company that to some
degree I fell into by accident back in 1993: I was asked by folks at what
was then US West’s Advanced Technologies group if I was interested in
working with the Time Warner Cable guys on a crazy project called the
Full Service Network.

So, the next day, I went to Time Warner Cable and talked to two guys
named Jim Chiddix and Mike Hayashi, and that was how it all began. I
really had a very special experience with Time Warner Cable, and so it
wasn’t an easy thing to leave. However, I think more than anything, I just
got to a point where I had to make a change. Let me explain. When I was
at Time Warner Cable, I had had a series of five-year plans for myself:
the first of those was to take the opportunity to work on the cable
industry’s analog-to-digital conversion. So, from the mid to the late
1990’s, I had a really unique opportunity to have a major role in Time
Warner Cable’s Pegasus program, which was the company’s effort to
convert to digital. During that time, we also had a covert plan, which Jim
Chiddix used to describe as an attempt to get to “everything-on-demand.”
So while we were ostensibly just implementing digital broadcast, we were
really preparing a platform that would gracefully migrate into
video-on-demand. (By the way, in those days, video-on-demand was
simply a generic phrase that meant using unicast video streams on a
one-to-one basis with the customer. Subsequently–fortunately or
unfortunately–it also became a marketing term, and towards the end of
the 1990’s and into the early 2000’s, it began to leak out as the brand
name for this new service that cable could provide.)

Anyway, this vision of “everything-on-demand” has been with me ever
since. My second five-year plan saw me working on building out the
video-on-demand platform at Time Warner Cable, and that eventually
resulted in Jim Chiddix asking me to put together the engineering team
for an internal start-up that became known as MystroTV. The goal of that
project was to make every broadcast program capable of being
time-shifted–so, capable of being paused, and started over again, and
even recorded and saved for later viewing much like you would do with a
DVR set-top box. “Network DVR” was actually a phrase that we used
back then to refer colloquially to what we were doing.

That project was technically very successful. We did a trial of the
MystroTV service in Green Bay, Wisconsin in which dozens of
programmers took part, and we had 200 of Time Warner Cable’s
employees up there using the service for over a year. The response was
very positive: even if they already had a DVR, they loved the
convenience and having the ability to watch what they wanted whenever,
even if they hadn’t remembered to set up their DVR schedule to record it.

Unfortunately, however, it turned out that we were way ahead of where
the business was back then: the advertisers and the rights-holders for the
programming just hadn’t figured out how to make this all make sense
from a business perspective–e.g., who would make the money, how
would the chain of content copyrights be protected, and how would the
advertising models work? And so, because we were so far ahead of the
curve, a big part of my third five-year stint at Time Warner Cable was
basically about productizing a lightweight version of MystroTV–which
ultimately went to market as Start Over.

Start Over has actually become quite successful. Time Warner Cable has
indicated that it is available to a sizeable number of their customers and
its convenience is being well received by customers. I understand the
complexity of content copyright issues so it’s encouraging that there seem
to be models maturing in that area as well. All in all, that’s a vision that’s
turned out quite well.

The other thing that I was involved in during my third five-year stint at
Time Warner Cable was building out the OpenCable platform. When
MystroTV was ramped down, along with Louis Williamson and most of
the MystroTV team, I returned to Time Warner Cable to work on this big
task of actually implementing the OpenCable Application Platform. I
spent a couple of years working with our internal engineering and
development resources, but also with Scientific-Atlanta, Motorola,
Samsung, Alticast, Vidiom Systems and others, to turn the OCAP
platform into a reality. As with everything else, when you got down to the
details, there was a lot of work to do.

When I got to the point where our implementation of OCAP was actually
being launched in the field–so, spring of last year–I started to cast about
for what my next big project would be. I came to the conclusion–which
many others had too–that I wanted to build a cable platform that would
allow the convergence of video from IP sources: so, of Internet-based
video or Internet-sourced video (I tend to avoid the term “IPTV,” by the
way, because it’s defined in so many different ways, depending on the
constituency). Basically, I was interested in expanding the platform to
create a user experience which would allow the viewer to browse IP
video streams in a very intuitive and elegant manner–and which would be
the realization of that “everything-on-demand” vision we’d had nearly 13
years ago. Actually, the whole time that we were building OCAP, I had

harbored a desire to push on this vision for “everything-on-demand.” The
Internet is an interesting variation of that vision, in that you certainly have
a one-to-one experience, as you browse and find things you’re interested
in. But the question is, how do you replicate that experience on the TV in
your living room as you sit in your comfortable couch with a relatively
primitive device in your hand–i.e., the remote control? How do you make
that kind of experience natural and intuitive? How do you make it so that
the end-user can sit down and browse video, and not even notice whether
it happens to be coming from a satellite in linear format, or coming from
a VOD server, or from a DVR, or even a disk drive on their PC via a
home network?

About a year ago, as I became excited by the idea of working on this, I
started to think it would be a good time for me to try things from the other
side–to go out to the vendor side of the product development community
and work with a number of different operators,. That’s definitely one of
the things I’m looking forward to: the fact that I’ll have the opportunity to
work with a plethora of operators–even with operators that might not be
in the traditional cable world. I was definitely very comfortable at Time
Warner Cable. It’s a terrific company with great people, and I left on good
terms with everybody there and felt that we’d achieved a lot. But, look,
I’m getting older! If I don’t give this a try now, I may never give it a try.

As for why I decided to join ActiveVideo after I left Time Warner Cable:
I got to know Jeff Miller last March, and ActiveVideo’s vision of
enabling the sourcing of video from the Internet and of using a very thin,
lightweight client is one that I share. That idea has actually been at the
heart of what I’ve been working on for years. The last two years of
ActiveVideo’s efforts have resulted in a very flexible video streaming and
interactive applications platform that can run on any number of devices
out there, including even some of the oldest, least powerful set-top boxes
as well as the newer boxes, and, of course, IP-connected devices such as
Web-connected TV’s, Blu-ray players, video game players and others.
And so, from talking to Jeff, I began to learn a lot about what
ActiveVideo is working on, and I found that we had a lot of commonality
of vision. We were both excited by the idea of developing robust, but
intuitive navigation models for interactive video services. Jeff eventually
asked me if I’d be interested in coming on board and actually building that
stuff, and I got more and more excited by the idea, and so that’s how I
ended up here.

[itvt]: Would it be fair to say that one of the reasons you left Time Warner
Cable was that they weren’t as interested in moving to IP–as interested in
the potential for cable of IP technology–as you were? I know that cable is
one day expected to move to IP, but was it that you perhaps felt it was
moving too slowly?

Callahan: It wasn’t about a negative like that. It was really because I
personally was looking for an opportunity to develop products that might
ultimately have a wider usage than the kinds of products I would have
developed within a large cable operator. I really wanted the opportunity
to work with a company like ActiveVideo Networks where we can
actually develop personalized video streaming.

What this company can do is basically create intelligent streams: i.e.,
synthesize MPEG video and metadata together, deliver that stream to a
very thin client, and allow the viewer to have a personalized, relevant
viewing experience. I use the term, “intelligent streaming,” to indicate
that the (unicast) MPEG-2 stream delivered to the customer is actually
composed of several different sources of media–e.g., an MPEG-2 file
from a local VOD server, one or more video sources streamed from an
Internet-based media server, a set of JPEG images, etc.–that are
“stitched” together into this standard MPEG-2 stream at the moment
requested and delivered to the set-top box. As the customer interacts with
the application–via the expected press/select of UI elements, cursor
movements, text entry, etc.–each command is sent back to the
ActiveVideo application (running in the network) and, depending on the
application logic, causes the various media sources to be modified and the
process of composing the MPEG-2 stream to be repeated. This all
happens in real time, so the customer has a great video-rich, interactive,
multimedia application experience that is unique to him or her. The fact
that ActiveVideo can deliver all that over MPEG-2 to existing set-top
boxes–and, of course, ultimately it can be delivered over IP to other
platforms too–was definitely very interesting to me.

[itvt]: Would it be fair to say that you were somewhat frustrated by the
amount of time it’s taking for tru2way/OCAP to be deployed, and that
you felt ActiveVideo’s platform presented a viable alternative? Or do you
rather see ActiveVideo’s platform as complementary to tru2way and also
to EBIF?

Callahan: Well, I would say that we always expect these new
technologies to be implemented faster than actually ever happens. When I
was working on FSN, back in 1996, I figured, “OK. By next year, this
technology is going to be everywhere.” I was only off by a few years, as
it turned out. Same thing with video-on-demand: we spent what felt like
an eternity getting cost-effective video streaming in place, and it still
ended up taking another three to five years, depending on how you want
to calculate it.

So yes, I would say I’m always somewhat impatient about these things. I
would love to see OCAP/tru2way and EBIF–and a whole bunch of other
technologies–become ubiquitous much faster than is currently happening.
I definitely do think it will take a while before OCAP is universally
available. Even though it’s basically a Java platform–so based on a
tried-and-true technology–there’s still a lot of room for more
optimization. It needs to be scaled and made robust. I think it will take a
few more years for it to become absolutely bulletproof.

But I do think that what ActiveVideo does is actually very
complementary to these technology standardization initiatives: I don’t see
it as competing with OCAP/tru2way. In my opinion, nothing but good
can come of there being a common platform that’s distributed across
multiple operators. The worst thing that could happen would be for this
situation to continue where there are literally dozens of different versions
of clients from different manufacturers, and even multiple different
versions of each manufacturer’s software. The amount of time it takes to
regression-test against each different version, every time you try to
introduce or upgrade a service, is simply cost-prohibitive. So I definitely
think that the tru2way and EBIF efforts are very important, and that
ActiveVideo complements these efforts: ActiveVideo’s client is really just
a very thin key-click client; the whole point of the ActiveVideo approach
is to do the heavy lifting–the video optimization, the interactive logic of a
given application–on the server side, on the network side; and the client,
then, is actually very collaborative. On an OCAP platform, it’s really just
a small Java app; and on the EBIF platform, the EBIF trigger simply fires
up the ActiveVideo client. So there’s really no conflict at all between
ActiveVideo and the cable industry’s standardization initiatives. The day
when Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, and Charter all
have Java platforms that are basically the same–that will be a good day
for ActiveVideo, just like it will be a good day for the interactive TV
industry as a whole.

[itvt]: Now, although I know neither party is being very public about this,
ActiveVideo Networks has been working closely with Time Warner
Cable for some time now, and your technology has been deployed on a
couple of their systems at least on a trial basis. Is the technology now
mature enough to be deployed by Time Warner Cable–and other
operators–on a commercial basis? And do you feel that your long
relationship with Time Warner Cable will accelerate that process?

Callahan: Well, what I can say is that I would certainly hope that
ActiveVideo would become a technology that’s widely used by Time
Warner Cable, and by other operators as well. As for whether the
technology is ready to deploy and ready to scale: it is definitely ready.
The core technology for ActiveVideo’s server-side processing and its
lightweight client are something that it and its predecessor company,
ICTV, have been working on for years now. Actually, one of the things I
wanted to be sure of before coming on board the company was that its
core technology was robust and deployable. And this robustness is not
just a result of the technology having been a long time in development: as
it happens–and I probably can’t talk too much about this–ActiveVideo’s
core technology has been deployed in a number of systems to many
hundreds of thousands of users. So, thanks to these real-world
deployments, the company has now had ample opportunity to find out
what the problems are with its platform, and to fix them. So the
ActiveVideo Networks platform is absolutely ready to go: it’s been
proven through multiple deployments to date, some of them quite large.
I’m now looking forward to the opportunity to take it to whichever
operators are interested in using it and getting it deployed in even bigger
systems.

Now, I have to acknowledge that the best person to answer your question
about whether the technology is ready for mass deployment would be our
senior engineer and chief operating officer, Don Gordon. He’s someone
I’d heard about for years and years–long before I joined ActiveVideo. He
was previously with Microsoft, and before that–and I think this is where I
first heard of him–at DIVA, which was one of the pioneers of
video-on-demand. Anyway, for the past year-and-a-half, Don has been
refactoring the core technology of the former ICTV into this intelligent
streaming capability of ActiveVideo Networks’ platform, and he’s
someone I have a lot of confidence in. So I absolutely think that our
technology is ready for mass deployment, and I think we enable
applications that operators are going to find very compelling. And I
should add that the technology is deployable by all kinds of different
operators: our platform doesn’t care whether it’s transmitting via MPEG-2
or MPEG-4, or whether it’s transmitting over IP.

[itvt]: Can you talk more about some of the things you’re interested in
using ActiveVideo’s technology for, now that you’re at the company? You
mentioned earlier that your main reason for leaving Time Warner Cable
and joining the company was in order to fulfill your vision for the future
of television, so presumably you already have in mind some projects you
want to work on…

Callahan: Absolutely. One of the things that ActiveVideo is well known
for–internally they call it “stitching”–is a process for massaging the
MPEG video to only deal with the portions of the application that are
modified at any given moment. Basically it means you don’t have to
re-encode an entire 30-frame-per-second MPEG video frame by frame.
You only have to stitch into the existing MPEG stream that part of the UI
or that part of the application that has a modification or a change. This is
much like the basic premise of MPEG itself, where the I-frame is the
complete picture, and the other formats of MPEG are modifications to
that baseline, and every few seconds you get a new baseline.

So anyway, the folks at ActiveVideo Networks have developed this
technology that allows them to basically have very good
compression–and thus very good scalability, because that’s always been
an issue with server-side architectures. And the way they’ve done this is
to really only send changes in the MPEG stream where they’re really
necessary. Of course, this isn’t a mind-boggling concept: lots of people
have a good understanding of the principle behind it, and, as I mentioned,
it’s part of the premise of MPEG itself. In addition to this, ActiveVideo
has enabled the stream with lots of other metadata, in order to render a
user interface, in order to prompt for keystroke input–things like that.

So one of the things I’d like to experiment with that is enabled by these
capabilities of ActiveVideo’s platform is something that I call
“never-ending navigation”–and, by the way, EBIF could be used to
initiate the viewing session for what I have in mind. Let me explain what
I’m talking about by giving you a scenario: you’re watching a program
you really love–for example, “The Sopranos”–and you’re interested in
finding out about other programs HBO has that are similar to it.
Currently, in order to find that content, you’d have to bring up

full-screen application that would cover most of the video and that would
have a somewhat limited interface, even with the more recent guides. So,
instead of that, let’s have a very subtle user interface. Let’s have what is
essentially a navigation toolbar–with the metadata that populates that
toolbar being delivered in real time with the stream that you’re watching.
What this means is that the content on the toolbar can be packaged in
such a way that, when you hit, say, the blue key on your remote control, a
nice little menu drops down and says, “Here are other episodes of ‘The
Sopranos’; here’s other content that stars James Gandolfini; here’s other
content that’s mob-related,” and so on.

With complete flexibility, the metadata architect for HBO or any other
programmer could create a database of its content that could be accessed
through this toolbar. The toolbar would also have some global options,
allowing the viewer who was done with HBO to go to another channel or
whatever. One way to conceive of this is that it would be somewhat akin
to the right-click function you have on Windows computers–which is one
of the things that Windows does really well, in my opinion. When you
right-click, that drops down a menu containing content and options
related to the application you’re currently working in. However, although
some of the operations listed on that menu are unique to Photoshop or
whatever application you’re in, there are also more global options that are
always listed regardless of the application–such as the ability to navigate
through your hard drive.

Anyway, the goal here is to create an interface that, rather than always
taking you away from the video you’re currently watching, is much more
non-intrusive and elegant, and would basically enable the viewer to
navigate from stream to stream very quickly and easily–so without
having to bring up the VOD application, without having to drill down
through a series of tree-structured menus, and so on. Basically, it would
allow the viewer to effortlessly browse, snack on content, and find the
things that interest them.

Jeff Miller came up with a very good analogy for what I have in mind
here: it’s really not dissimilar in its concept to the experience of using
YouTube–though the specific interface YouTube has would likely
change for television. With YouTube, once you find the video you’re
looking for, you’re presented with a whole bunch of videos that are on
related topics; and the typical user generally views two, three or four
other videos that they would never have watched, had the service not
subtly and unobtrusively guided them to those videos. The whole process
is driven by affinities in the content, and not by hierarchies of menus.

So anyway, I think that ActiveVideo has a platform and a technology
which–along with some of the things I’ve been working on with Time
Warner Cable and the rest of the cable industry for the past 10 years–can
blow the doors off the traditional program guidance model. We can
develop a very interesting and compelling user interface for the
television.

Now, the content that this user interface would present to the viewer
wouldn’t necessarily just be content promoted by the content owners. The
interface would also feature some kind of relevance engine that would
present you with other programs you might be interested in, based on
your specific viewing behavior. Or it could present you with other content
based on Web 2.0 scenarios–so on recommendations from community
networks. For example, if you were watching “The Sopranos,” and you
brought up the navigation toolbar, you might find that the community had
commented on the various other pieces of content it brought up, and rated
them–perhaps with simple emoticons that could be entered with the
remote control.

Anyway, the point of all this is to have a navigation model that puts the
content front and center, that has an elegant interface, and that binds the
video and navigation into an intuitive user experience, wherever the video
comes from–whether it’s the Internet, VOD servers, or broadcast. Those
are some of the objectives I want to work on with ActiveVideo Networks,
and I’m really looking forward to having the opportunity to do so.

[itvt]: Your idea for “never-ending navigation” seems somewhat similar
to what other people in the industry are calling “video navigation.” I
know that a lot of players in the industry–GuideWorks and OpenTV, for
example–are looking to develop navigation that’s content-driven and
avoids the classic EPG grid-format…

Callahan: You’re absolutely right. I don’t claim to be the first with any of
these ideas: I think a lot of people are aiming in more or less the same
direction, and implementing this kind of thing is something people have
been talking about for some time. I’ve known GuideWorks’ Gerard
Kunkel for years now, and we’ve had some really exhilarating discussions
about all this. Of course, what it will come down to is the specifics of
each company’s implementations of new, more intuitive forms of
navigation.

I should also point out that the kind of navigation system I was just
describing isn’t by any means the only thing ActiveVideo is working on,
or that I’ll be working on. We’ll be developing a whole bouquet of
different types of services.

[itvt]: Will ActiveVideo target this “never-ending navigation” capability
at cable MSO’s? If so, don’t the operators already have fairly
well-established plans in place for next-generation TV guidance/operating
systems–whether they’re developing them in-house, like Comcast is with
its GuideWorks unit, or with third parties, like Cox is doing with NDS?
Or is this something you’re thinking more of targeting at telcos and at
smaller cable operators?

Callahan: “Never-ending navigation” is really a conceptual or
philosophical baseline for a user experience that is video-rich,
personalized, relevant, and intuitive to use without a complicated
input/control device. It’s not a specific product for a specific customer. As
you note, cable operators have in-house development groups and are
investing in their own product roadmaps–as are telephone companies.
My objective is that ActiveVideo, working with these operators, will
greatly add to their ability to present a variety of compelling, interactive
media-streaming services to their customers via their respective
navigation platforms. ActiveVideo takes advantage of something that the
operators do better than almost anyone else: i.e., unicast video streaming
with very high quality of service. As ActiveVideo’s presence in the set-
top box itself is very simple, it complements the rest of the navigation
functionality that the operator develops.

[itvt]: Obviously, a lot of industry players are interested in the idea of
intuitive, content-driven navigation. What do you think will differentiate
ActiveVideo’s implementation of this idea?

Callahan: There are a few major differentiators for ActiveVideo’s
platform. First, as all the complicated application logic and media
rendering is done on network servers, a media-rich user experience can be
developed, which is often difficult to do on set-top boxes that do not have
powerful processors and lots of memory. Second, this media-rich user
experience can be delivered to all devices with an MPEG-2 decoder (and
this is all digital set-tops boxes deployed in the field for the past 10+
years–from the oldest SD to the newest HD DVR, and everything in
between). Third, ActiveVideo’s platform does not just deliver a stored
MPEG-2 video asset, it locates the appropriate content–using standard
URI/URL Web standards–for the application, whether it’s video files,
images, etc., and composites these sources in real time into a standard
MPEG-2 video stream. If we combine these capabilities in the context of

“never-ending navigation,” we can envision a video stream containing
within it the necessary metadata for rendering a compelling, personalized
user experience–picture a screen with a combination of video and
graphics that represents the customer’s “favorites” as defined by profile or
behavior–and, based on the customer’s selections via the remote control,
rendering a new video stream in real-time. As I was describing earlier, the
metadata driving what the customer watches and how the navigation is
displayed is easily enabled by the ActiveVideo platform–again to all
MPEG-2 devices. This fits our “Sopranos” scenario or YouTube-like
scenario very well. The fourth point is that ActiveVideo applications will
be displayed just as the author designed them, no matter what set-top box
they are deployed to–thanks to ActiveVideo’s “Studio” which features
standard AVML and DHTML technologies. This is a solution to the
“lowest common denominator” problem of client-side application
platforms–i.e., where an application will have to be developed to look
and act differently depending on the class of set-top box it is running on
(which is both technically difficult and, from the content-developer point
of view, not an ideal situation).

[itvt]: What other projects are you planning to work on at ActiveVideo, in
addition to “never-ending navigation”?

Callahan: I cannot go into specifics, but I can say that we are very
interested in assisting the efforts to enable an advertising platform that
meets the needs of operators and advertisers. ActiveVideo does not see
itself developing campaign management platforms, but we will be
working closely with the industry to support the relevant platforms as
they emerge. The ability to execute on all set-top boxes is something that
needs to be married to a business platform that will take advantage of
that.

[itvt]: ActiveVideo just hired a high-profile advertising-industry figure,
Todd Nisbet, to lead its interactive and targeted advertising efforts. Could
you talk a little about the kinds of things you’ll be working with him on?

Callahan: A key virtue of ActiveVideo is that it enables advertising to be
targeted, interactive, accountable and actionable, just like on the Internet.
Campaigns can be developed once and made available to viewers on any
set-top box, giving advertisers the scale that they desire. We think this
ability to deliver Internet-style advertising with scale will be very
valuable to advertisers. Todd is working to create partnerships with some
carefully chosen brands to validate the efficacy of the kind of advertising
ActiveVideo enables.

[itvt]: Can you talk about how ActiveVideo’s technology could be used to
enable user-generated content or social TV services?

Callahan: I’m not ready to talk about all this at this stage, but I will say
that ActiveVideo has the platform to bring UGC and Web 2.0 services to
the operators’ television platforms without need of DOCSIS, MOCA, or
other emerging technologies.

[itvt]: ActiveVideo recently announced that it had enhanced its platform
to address TV on multiple kinds of network-connected devices. Could
you explain the significance of this announcement and how it plays into
the company’s strategy going forward?

Callahan: The same advantage of the ActiveVideo platform that makes it
a compelling choice for thin-client set-top boxes also works well when
considering the plethora of other platforms that are in the market: e.g.,
broadband connected devices. In general, the ability to author and deploy
a compelling application–whether it is a “traditional” interactive
television application or a complex Web 2.0 service–to thin-client
devices is what ActiveVideo’s strategy is all about.

[itvt]: Presumably, due to the nature of ActiveVideo’s technology, the
company frequently finds itself having to think up ways of repurposing
Web content for television. Do you have any general thoughts on the
design principles for successfully effecting this kind of translation?

Callahan: I don’t believe this is an issue “due to the nature of
ActiveVideo’s technology.” Rather, I believe it’s the realization, on the
part of passionate and professional content producers and application
developers, that the strengths and weaknesses of a large screen display, a
simple remote control, and the user’s expectations of application behavior
all contribute to the need to design a different presentation and experience
on the television–even when using the same content that is delivered via
the Web. This is not unique to television; it is true for all presentation
platforms–PC’s, mobile phones, PDA’s, etc. I personally believe the
television experience is expected to be, above all else, simple. With
respect to ActiveVideo’s technology, it allows Web developers to
repurpose a cool Web application using Web authoring tools that they are
likely familiar with, and–when they get a user experience laid out to their
satisfaction in all respects–they know that it will be executed with exactly
that presentation on all ActiveVideo-connected platforms. Of course, this
Web developer could leave the user experience exactly the same as it is
on the Web: the results will not likely be as compelling to the user but the
ActiveVideo technology will faithfully deliver it!

[itvt]: Now that you’ve joined ActiveVideo Networks, will you be moving
from Denver to Silicon Valley?

Callahan: No, not at this point. I’ve lived in Denver for almost 20
years—other than for one year I spent in Connecticut–and my son is still
at high school, so we’re not going to be moving at this point. I’m not
opposed to the idea of moving, but we’ll be staying in Denver for the time
being.

ActiveVideo Networks

Yahoo and Intel previewed their Widget Channel today, a “television application framework optimized for TV and related devices.” Essentially, the two companies are showing how to bring a wide range of new applications to TV via widgets, and they’re advocating for an open standard in order to fill out a “TV Widget ecosystem”. (Analysis up from ABI and NewTeeVee)

I’ve followed Yahoo’s next-gen TV efforts sporadically for a couple of years now, and I’ve heard about Intel’s work in integrating TV and the Internet as well. This announcement didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s nonetheless a pretty big milestone in the ongoing evolution of television. Widgets, which are deployed all over the Web, are still fairly rare in the living-room TV experience. While there are exceptions, most TV services do not come with Internet-based applications today, much less choose-your-own widgets.

Since Motorola executive Nick Chakalos was quoted in the Intel/Yahoo release, I thought I’d catch up with him for a few quick questions. Here’s what he had to say.

Can you explain how the Widget Channel works?

It’s very similar to widget services on the Web. The vision is that consumers would go to the Widget Channel to access a menu or gallery of applications designed to personalize the TV experience and make it more interactive. For example, users could pick widgets that would track sports stats or allow interaction among friends around television programming.

Motorola added a quote to the Intel/Yahoo release. What is Motorola’s involvement or interest in the widget initiative from Intel and Yahoo?

For Motorola, the value is in the goal of Intel and Yahoo to create an open standard for bringing interactive applications to the TV. We’ve been part of the evolution of TV technology for decades, so of course we’ve been examining how to integrate the power of the Internet with traditional television broadcasting. In ongoing discussions with both Intel and Yahoo, we’ve seen a lot of promise in the concept of widgetized TV. We also think that Motorola is very well positioned to bring this type of service to an operator environment, whether IPTV or cable, where integration with legacy or next-gen infrastructure such as OCAP/tru2way is a challenge we can address.

How do you see this initiative unfolding?

Operators are experimenting now with different ways to expand the TV experience, but it will definitely start in the retail channel on devices like Blu-ray Disc players, Internet-capable TVs, game consoles and set-tops. We’ll see it introduced in the cable and telco channels after technology, consumer adoption and business models are proven.

The last time I talked extensively about Motorola’s OCAP software development kit, the name tru2way hadn’t even been unveiled. Now that tru2way is everywhere, and cable operators and CE vendors alike have thrown their weight behind it, I’m thrilled to finally have an update on the SDK. It’s available! Today!

Official word on the hold-up is that a thorough open source audit mired the SDK in testing much longer than expected. The good news is, because the Motorola tool is built on open source, customers don’t need to worry about any other third-party licenses.

To clear up a few questions on the SDK, I talked with Motorola’s Frank Goddard yesterday. Here are the details:

Who is the SDK geared for?
The SDK is suited for three types of customers: established interactive TV vendors like TV Guide and Microsoft, new application developers (including small development shops), and cable operators themselves.

What does it include?
Motorola ships the SDK software and a Motorola set-top to every licensee so applications can be tested in a stand-alone environment. There is no additional hardware needed – no headend, no object carousel servers, nothing. Customers also get full access to a technical support website and regular software upgrades as Motorola releases updates.

Are there any other OCAP SDKs available today?
There are, but they tend to be very expensive and/or require additional hardware. Motorola’s solution is relatively inexpensive.

What kinds of OCAP/tru2way applications are we likely to see developed?
Initially the focus is on program guides (EPGs) and VOD services, though there will likely be a push for new advertising applications beyond that.

What kind of response is Motorola expecting for the SDK?
There has already been a huge response among people who were aware that an SDK would be made available. Orders are already coming in.

Is there a product fact sheet?
It is now available here.

Are there any product pictures?
Screenshots of the interface and a sample gaming application are below.

–New HITS AxIS Clients are NDS, Softel-USA, S&T, and Unisoft
–Buckeye CableSystem to Serve as Beta Site for HITS AxIS ITV Services

Comcast Media Center (note: the company, generally known as CMC, is a business unit of Comcast that provides centralized content management and distribution services for cable operators and content providers) says that it has signed up four more companies for its recently launched HITS AxIS service: NDS, a provider of conditional access and interactive TV technologies; Softel-USA, which is best known for its MediaSphere line of ITV products, including the widely deployed MediaSphere TX broadcast carousel; Strategy & Technology, whose TSBroadcaster carousel management and streaming product is being used for a number of OCAP/tru2way roll-outs across the US; and Unisoft, which specializes in providing broadcast, development and testing tools for ITV applications.

HITS AxIS (stands for “Headend In The Sky Advanced Interactive Services”) is a centralized platform that operates on the National Authorization System (NAS) and that is billed as being designed to support developers of advanced OCAP/tru2way and ETV/EBIF interactive TV applications and to facilitate the deployment and management of those applications on cable systems serving small- to mid-sized markets. According to CMC, the platform, which was developed in collaboration with Vidiom and TVWorks, two companies well-known for their work in the ETV/EBIF and tru2way/OCAP spaces (note: TVWorks is co-owned by Comcast and Cox), is currently supporting product development activities for a number of other ITV application developers, including Alticast, BIAP, emuse, Ensequence, Sofia Digital, vivoTRAK and Zodiac Interactive. Its product development services are expected to eventually encompass business modeling, licensing and application testing (both standalone and interoperability); its deployment services are expected to include configuration, hosting, affiliate sales, contract management, and product launches to HITS’ cable system affiliates; and its operations management services are expected to include application and network monitoring, updates and upgrade management, billing services and customer support, security, technical support, and disaster recovery. CMC positions the service as providing “cable system operators with an alternative to headend-based solutions for launching and supporting advanced interactive video applications,” and says that affiliates of its HITS Quantum service will be able to use HITS AxIS to offer interactive services to customers using their existing headend management systems. “HITS AxIS is ready to support the development, delivery and management of advanced interactive video applications, and we are very pleased to be working with a growing number of leading companies in the ITV space,” Gary Traver, SVP and COO of Comcast Media Center, said in a prepared statement. “In addition to our support for the applications development community, HITS AxIS can provide an end-to-end solution for cable system operators, allowing them to offer advanced services to their customers more easily and more cost effectively.”

Last week, CMC announced that independent cable operator, Buckeye CableSystem (serves around 150,000 customers in Northwest and North Central Ohio and in Southeast Michigan), has signed an agreement to act as a beta site for advanced interactive TV applications that are tested, launched and supported by HITS AxIS. “Buckeye CableSystem welcomes the opportunity to work with Comcast Media Center on a beta trial of the HITS AxIS service,” BuckEye CableSystem CTO, Joe Jensen, said in a prepared statement. “We see this as an opportunity not only to understand the AxIS service better, but also to develop a further understanding of some of the ETV/EBIF applications and their implications in our network.”

In other CMC news: The company says it is expanding its national VOD service to include transport via MPEG-4 compression technology (note: CMC claims that its MPEG-2 service currently delivers over 8,000 VOD assets per month to millions of VOD households served by around 20 of the US’s largest cable MSO’s). It says it expects to do this via SES Americom’s satellite-delivered IP-PRIME service, pending the signing of a definitive agreement between the two companies. “Extending our VOD capabilities to include MPEG-4 transport allows television programming networks and other content providers to reach their MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 distributors ‘All from The Center,’” CMC’s Gary Traver said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to making this new service available via SES Americom’s IP-PRIME service.” Added IP-PRIME president, Bill Squadron: “As consumer demand for more programming, including more VOD, continues to grow, this initiative with Comcast Media Center helps ensure that we can provide IP-PRIME operators with the best and most comprehensive IPTV service offering in the market. This collaboration with CMC extends our relationship, which until now has primarily focused on SES Americom’s satellite distribution of their services.” CMC bills its managed VOD platform as providing content providers with a cost-effective way to deliver VOD to their cable operator affiliates and as allowing cable operators to accept content from multiple sources without having to coordinate, manage and manipulate the content at each headend. Services provided by the platform include creation and validation of metadata, pitching of VOD content to local servers, 24/7 quality assurance monitoring, and a secure Internet portal that allows affiliates to track when programming has propagated from the CMC catcher to the affiliate’s VOD system (it can list VOD assets by programmer or provide a total view of VOD assets). SES Americom bills IP-PRIME as a customizable, MPEG-4-based, turnkey IPTV solution, featuring 45 HD channels and 260 SD channels. It is scheduled to add VOD services to its programming options in the fourth quarter.