TWENTY in Software

Generation QR Code ISO/IEC18004 in Software TWENTY

DBS subscribers may be, in fact, the first en masse consumers to get access to the first ITV applications Both EchoStar and DirecTV, for example, have made EPGs available on their settop receivers They have also been aggressively building alliances through strategic technology and marketing partnerships with companies such as OpenTV, Microsoft s WebTV, and TiVo America Online has invested $15 billion in General Motors Hughes Electronics, which owns DirecTV, and struck partnerships with ITV middleware providers such as Liberate and TiVo for their AOLTV platform Sky Broadcasting has aggressively launched Open Interactive (also called Open or Open ) to rave reviews and growing profits We may even see Rupert Murdoch of the Sky empire buy DirecTV soon to enlarge it Other competing services to Open such as Energis, will deploy in 2001 The strategy behind all this is to attract further dissatisfied cable and telecommunications customers and, perhaps, get a jump on that industry for T-commerce opportunities Industry rivalries such as these keep the pressure on for the development of more ITV backend architectures

From the very late 1990s to the present, the ITV industry has finally started to take shape Why Bandwidth is finally achieving the speeds necessary to process digital video, computer technologies are becoming device-centric, innovations in software have paved the way, lessons have been learned, and early forms of content and applications are proving the concept In this environment, not only are we seeing more established companies embracing ITV as a long-term strategy, newer ITV companies are emerging a few have gone public (eg, ACTV, Liberate, OpenTV, TiVo, WorldGate, and Wink) Large mergers are also taking place interindustry and intraindustry (eg, Liberate MoreCom for $521 million, and OpenTV Spyglass for $21 billion) To capture the evolution of this phenomenal growth, general media and trade publications are making room for coverage of the topic (eg, my email newsletter InteractiveIV Today [itvt] focuses exclusively on news, trends and analysis of

ITV) In the end, however, it s the actual solutions the standalone retail products, set-top boxes, middleware platforms, data broadcasting services, and other types of ITV applications being deployed commercially that will determine whether the industry is taking root and will thrive in the years to come The strategic combination of these and their associated business models will establish what and how content producers can realistically begin to produce and broadcast STAND-ALONE RETAIL PRODUCTS Early in the history of ITV (1995), Intel released a stand-alone product to the shelves called Intercast that featured software bundled with commercially offered TV tuner cards Intercast gave the public its first example of interactive data and television in a unified environment viewable on a PC Content developers included CNN, CNBC, Lifetime, QVC, M2, Lifetime, and The Weather Channel NBC, an early partner, broadcast a special Intercast version of the 1996 Summer Olympics a project for which the network had high hopes Unfortunately, Intercast found few buyers as TV tuner cards were still such a new concept, difficult to install, and there was not enough content offered to capture consumers interest In 1999, Intel withdrew its support for the product in order to refocus their efforts on developments within ATVEF After that, Intel became very involved in the evolution of that commercial organization and invested aggressively in projects in association with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), although even these strategies have greatly shifted as Intel repositions its investments around information appliances in general rather than ITV specifically WebTV established itself as an important leader in the industry when it premiered a stand-alone set-top box with an information and Internet service in October, 1996 Grabbing the media and consumer s attention with low prices and couchbased access, WebTV (purchased by Microsoft in 1997 for $400 million) now has over a one million subscriber base Although this number and rate of growth has been disappointing to industry observers, WebTV has created a bit of a cult following with users, obtained space on several MSO set-tops in