ICTV Renames Itself ‘ActiveVideo Networks’

Web-On-TV Company Also Debuts New Interactive TV Apps

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 5/17/2008 4:01:00 PM MT

NEW ORLEANS—ICTV is dropping its name of 18 years to become ActiveVideo Networks, and the company says it has a bevy of interactive TV applications to go with the new moniker.

The name is meant to underscore the Silicon Valley company’s mission: “It’s infusing television with Web technology,” said Ed Forman, ActiveVideo's executive vice president and chief strategy officer.

This week it will show off some 20 interactive TV applications in three areas: social networking; video-on-demand menuing; and "ActiveVideo Channels," which are interactive portals for featuring personalized content or ad showcases.

For example, the proof-of-concept demos will provide access to YouTube, Facebook and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site through set-top boxes, using a remote control.

“You can find out what TV shows are your friends' favorites, or look at their photos,” Forman said.

In addition, ActiveVideo will debut a new set-top client that uses the cable industry’s Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) specification, to access interactive polling, advertising showcases and other content. The client, according to ActiveVideo, requires no integration work or special code to run in standard ETV-capable cable set-tops.

Providing such Web-like features on TV sets is a clear area of interest for cable industry.

Comcast, for one, last week acquired social-networking site Plaxo for an undisclosed sum. Comcast said it plans to integrate Internet-based community features with TV and phone services using the Plaxo technology.

ActiveVideo, which recently relocated to San Jose, Calif., from nearby Los Gatos, charges programmers a distribution fee based on aggregated viewer hours to provide their content to cable operators. The company's customers include CNN, Fox, HSN, Reuters, AccuWeather and games developer TAG Networks.

Ultimately ActiveVideo envisions itself becoming a distribution hub for interactive TV programming to the cable industry, in the way Akamai Technologies has become a major content distribution network on the Internet.

“We do everything in the network,” Forman said. “We look just like a network for distributing broadband content.”

However, getting distribution deals with cable operators has proven to be extremely tough.

As a proof point that ActiveVideo's interactive Web-delivered content is engaging with subscribers, Forman cited an analysis of data collected in a small system run by a “tier-one operator.”

According to ActiveVideo, 63% of households in the system with access to the service visited it at least once between Jan. 1 and mid-April. The average length of an ActiveVideo visit during that period was 16 minutes and 35 seconds. Most of the time spent was on games, Forman noted.

One of the bigger challenges, according to Forman, was that the operator had a “Noah's ark” of technology, with set-top boxes that had a wide range of capabilities.

Forman would not identify the operator. Multichannel News has previously reported that Time Warner Cable has used the ICTV technology in its LaPlace, La., system—just west of New Orleans.

CableLabs' tru2way specification is an attempt to drive the industry toward a single, robust platform for interactive services. Wouldn't ubiquitous adoption of tru2way render ActiveVideo's model obsolete?

Not anytime soon, said Forman, who said even tru2way (a.k.a. OpenCable) set-top boxes “come in all different shapes and sizes,” meaning content will still need to be tweaked for all the different flavors of hardware in the field.

“What programmers and advertisers want is ubiquity,” Forman said. “Fragmentation is the barrier to progress.”