Monday, November 24, 2008

Interactive TV Reinvents Itself - Nov. 20 iBreakfast

Welcome to the world of the SuperDVR - getting the show you want when you want it. It is really the convergence of IPTV, what speaker Shelly Palmer elaborates in his book TV Disrupted (version 2 is coming out shortly) in what he calls the migration from Network TV to Networked TV.

Mark Risis, TiVo; Alan Body iBreakfast; Shelly Palmer, Advanced Media; Gary Lauder, Lauder Partners

In its simplest form it just means that any video anywhere – whether Network TV, Cable, Pay-per-View or any YouTube or Internet Video can be retrieved and called up on your TV. This is where the giant screen TVs and those increasingly elaborate set-top boxes will really earn their keep.

Moreover, as you see this evolve, the convergence with mobile both as a kind of smart clicker (that’s where Bluetooth really kicks in) and as a remote viewing device for what you have overcaptured. There is also an emerging video conversation that young people are already engaged in over the internet, is as we can see from TiVo, moving on to interactive TV.
This is where TiVo is getting interesting.

For all the early hype, there is really only one company that has brought us a successful form of iTV and that is TiVo – wich is really just a vision of making a TV work like a VCR thanks to some cool software and a big hard drive. So their next steps into the future are compelling – now they are offering a convergence with broadband so you can start doing what kids everywhere are doing, looking at YouTube videos, but on your giant TV instead of a laptop. To pay for it, and all the commercial zapping that takes place with commercial TV, they are getting advertisers to offer special TiVo friendly versions of their ads that send out a banner message as they are being skimmed.

This in turn is another new frontier of the TV experience, enabling viewers to get a video shorthand of all the material they are now amassing……and this, along iwht the mobile component will be the topics we revisit when we do iTV Reinvented Part II.

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