Comcast: ITV for 50 Nets

Operator Targets EBIF Across Motorola Footprint by Midyear

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 3/15/2010 7:35:00 AM

New York — Comcast is taking interactive TV even bigger later this year, whether or not Canoe Ventures is seaworthy anytime soon.

The cable operator aims to have the ability to deliver interactive TV applications from as many as 50 networks in the second half of 2010 across more than 12 million households, said Comcast senior vice president of video development Todd Walker.

Moreover, according to Walker, Canoe — the advanced-advertising joint venture of the U.S.’s six biggest MSOs — is in the process of figuring out how to extend interactive capabilities to broadcast networks.

“Canoe is meeting with the broadcast networks. We have to figure it out for this to be successful,” said Walker, speaking at an interactive-TV event held by the New York chapter of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing.

Canoe is expecting to launch a request for information advertising service nationwide in the second quarter of 2010 in conjunction with one cable network.

Initially, though, Comcast and other cable operators will be focused on enabling ITV applications with cable programmers.

HSN is Comcast’s charter network partner for ITV. The channel’s Shop by Remote is currently available to 12 million Comcast subscribers and the application — which lets viewers buy the current item being offered for sale — has a 10% sales-conversion rate, Walker said. With the HSN Shop by Remote app on Comcast, the shopping channel also has signed up 1,200 new subscribers who had never bought anything from it before.

To date, Comcast has deployed user agents for CableLabs’ Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format to 19 million Motorola set-top boxes. That represents about 85% of the cable operator’s Motorola footprint, and Comcast is shooting to get all Motorola set-tops enabled by midyear, Walker said.

In the back half of 2010, Comcast’s goal is to “enable 50 networks to deploy interactivity when they choose to do so,” Walker said. To get there, Comcast will be engaged in “pipe cleaning” reengineering processes, to be able to accommodate the additional bandwidth needs of EBIF apps.

“We just don’t have the bandwidth to deploy a lot of different applications,” Walker said.

In another phase of Comcast’s EBIF rollout, the MSO is working with ITV development firm Itaas to port the EBIF user agent to Cisco Systems set-tops. That agent should be ready to deploy by late 2010 or early 2011, Walker said.