Nets: Make OCAP Happen
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 5/13/2007 8:00:00 PM
Las Vegas — Las Vegas— Three top TV programming executives said cable operators have been slow off the mark in deploying a standardized platform for interactive television, making it impossible to launch applications on any sort of scale.
The hope is that the industry is now serious about adopting CableLabs' OpenCable Application Platform, which would provide a common middleware for programmers and advertisers.
“We want the operators to raise their hands and say, 'We'll make [OCAP] happen,'” said Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for the Disney ABC Television Group, at a panel discussion at The Cable Show here.
The pace of OCAP deployments has been “slower than we'd like it to be,” The Weather Channel CEO Debora Wilson said, though she noted that “operators have had a lot on their plate,” including the move to add more HD programming.
Added Wilson, “We as programmers support OCAP because it allows us to publish and deploy broadly. Otherwise, you have a really difficult, and probably impossible, environment to program content and advertising against.”
Cable has been working on OCAP for at least eight years and operators still have yet to move beyond limited market trials on the technology. Recently the industry pledged to widely roll out the technology by the third quarter of 2008.
In the absence of a common ITV platform, programmers have been doing more work with interactive video applications on the Internet, as they race to keep up with the YouTubes of the world to find new ways to engage the next generation of viewers.
“We're competing with folks who can take our content, unpaid for, and take it wherever they want and do whatever they want with it,” NBC Universal chief digital officer George Kliavkoff said. With interactive TV, “we need to figure out how to make the experience better for the consumer, and there's not a lot of time to get it perfect.”
The Weather Channel has developed an OCAP-based application, which allows a viewer to see weather information for different areas and see what programs are coming up on the network. But today, Wilson said, there aren't many cable operators that have OCAP-enabled set-tops or headends to run such an application. “We have to have the ability to deploy,” she said. “That's a fundamental, sort of gatekeeping thing.”
ABC developed a prototype of an OCAP application for the show Lost, which provided a trivia game that viewers could play during the show. However, Cheng said, “We didn't think this would be a great viewer experience. People are so used to the 10-foot application; it was more distracting and less entertaining.”
Cheng said with ITV applications, ABC is leaning away from content and toward ads. “We really feel the advertising opportunity is greater,” he said. “We've focused on delivering a better message for [advertising] clients.”
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