Canoe Floats VOD, Interactive Demos

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 5/10/2010 12:01:00 AM

Canoe Ventures will roll out the first public looks at two key projects from inside its boathouse.

The company, the joint venture of the six largest U.S. cable companies, will show off an initial interactive-TV advertising feature publicly for the first time at the 2010 Cable Show, as well as how it expects to deliver dynamic video-on-demand ads nationwide.

The show floor’s Canoe Channel, at channel position 1200, will comprise short videos with commercial breaks featuring Canoe’s request-for-information application template. The demo, to be housed in the My World exhibit, will trigger mocked-up RFIs during spots, including PSAs for Autism Speaks and Broadband for America and a History Channel promo that lets viewers request a brochure.

The Canoe demo is being powered by a special-purpose headend Time Warner Cable is setting up at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“It’s a real EBIF application being sent by Time Warner specifically for the show,” Canoe chief technology officer Arthur Orduna said.

Canoe expects to commercially launch the RFI service within the next two months with one unnamed cable network. The launch will deliver a national RFI campaign that lets subscribers request coupons, product samples or information to be sent in the mail. Canoe has been field testing the interactive template, which is based on Cable- Labs’ Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format, with all MSO members since late 2009.

“We’ve tested the RFI template with all the commercially deployed EBIF UAs [user agents] and across multiple classes of set-tops,” Orduna said. Canoe’s demo at the Cable Show will use a higher-end TWC set-top capable of displaying 8-bit graphics, but the EBIF apps also can run on low-powered cable boxes such as the Motorola DCT 2000.

In addition to the RFI app, Canoe will stage a multivendor demonstration in the CableNET exhibit area that shows dynamic insert of different ads into VOD content. That demo will use the SCTE 130 standard for ad insertion as well as CableLabs’ Stewardship & Fulfillment Interfaces spec.

“It’s to prove that Canoe can work with national programmers and their non-linear inventory, and steward a national campaign across multiple MSO systems,” Orduna said.

The dynamic VOD ad-insertion project is being developed at Canoe’s Innovation Lab in Centennial, Colo. Vendors working in the lab’s prototype-only environment, established with CableLabs to test prototypes of future applications, include Cisco Systems, OpenTV, Ericsson, Motorola and This Technology LLC.

The Cable Show demo will feature VOD ads being served in two ways: one in which the campaign execution is handled by the MSO at the local level through its ad decision server; and another in which Canoe handles the execution at a national level. Canoe was formed in 2008 by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision Systems and Bright House Networks.