Showtime Sees Interactive-TV Lift

Network Lures New Subs Via Instant-Ordering App

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 10/10/2011 12:01:00 AM

New York — Showtime Networks’ interactive TV app — which lets subscribers order the premium network with one click of the remote — won an audience vote as the best out of a field of five contenders in the “iTV Idol: Groundbreaking Applications” session at CTAM in New York.

More than 30% of orders to Showtime now come through the ITV app in markets where it has launched David Preisman, Showtime’s vice president of interactive television, said. He added that those subscribers have identical churn rates to subs acquired through traditional call-center ordering.

“Once it’s launched, there’s money coming in every day,” Preisman said.

Showtime’s app is live with four affiliates — Cablevision Systems, Dish Network, Oceanic Time Warner Cable in Hawaii and Verizon FiOS TV — with additional partners in the pipeline. Th e app is available on four different ITV platforms: CableLabs’ Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format, ActiveVideo Networks, OpenTV and Lua, an open scripting language used by FiOS TV. Interactive- TV developer Itaas created the EBIF version of the app for Showtime.

In addition to ordering Showtime, the app lets viewers sample full episodes and other content. “The idea is really to improve the way people buy premium channels,” Preisman said in his presentation. “Today, you have to call up, navigate a phone menu and talk to a customer rep — it shouldn’t be like that in 2011.”

Most frequently, when you tune to Showtime channels as a nonsubscriber, “you get a blue screen with an error message on it,” he added.

The 100-some audience members awarded second place to a multifunction app developed for WE tv, Fuse and MSG by Ensequence, which can provide quizzes, polls, tune-to channel and social-media integration, among other features.

The other three entrants were: Itaas’s tablet computer app that lets users to discover and tune to content, create playlists and set reminders for upcoming content; an app from The Weather Channel, developed with Nielsen MediaSync, that uses audio watermarks in the show to unlock synchronized content for original series From the Edge; and Intrasonics’ app for smartphones and tablets that lets users engage with TV shows and ads.

The “iTV Idol” competition was co-sponsored by Canoe Ventures and the Cable & Telecommunication Association for Marketing.