Concurrent, GoldPocket Announce Plans to Integrate Technologies

Concurrent's Mike Tudisco Explains the Partnership to [itvt]

VOD equipment provider, Concurrent Computer, and interactive TV company, GoldPocket Interactive, earlier this month announced plans to integrate GoldPocket's ITV technologies with Concurrent's MediaHawk VOD platform and its Interactive Media Solution (enables MSO's and content providers to design their own branded VOD portals, complete with promotional content such as movie barkers and targeted commercials). The companies say that the integration will not only make it possible to store enhanced TV programs on VOD servers, but will allow cable operators to offer programming and services that combine VOD with two-way interactivity, thus creating new revenue opportunities: an operator might, for example, use GoldPocket's StoryTeller authoring environment to create "hotspots" that are layered on top of objects or characters in a VOD program; viewers who clicked on the hotspots would then be "telescoped" to commerce applications (allowing them to, for example, purchase a piece of clothing worn by one of the program's characters). Alternatively, a "hotspot" in a linear TV program could take viewers to a long-format commercial hosted on a Concurrent VOD server.

According to its VP of customer service and product management, Mike Tudisco, Concurrent decided to partner with GoldPocket because of feedback it has received from its cable customers that a significant portion of their subscribers are eager for more interactivity: "The marketing folks at the cable companies that we've spoken to--and that's where we get a lot of our intelligence from--believe that their subscribers, particularly the higher-end subscribers that are embracing HDTV, DVR and so on, would be very, very excited at the opportunity to engage with more interactivity," he told [itvt]. "Those high-end subscribers, at least, don't want to be just passive participants in TV any more. Although existing VOD systems have very limited interactive capabilities, these subscribers love the idea of being able to interact, even at the level that we can provide them with right now--navigating through content, going to genres they like, taking a piece of content, fast-forwarding it, rewinding it, bookmarking it, starting it over? They like that combination of being able to view something on their own schedules, and then interacting with it to the level that the traditional VOD vendors can provide. So, if you can combine the basic interactivity offered by VOD systems with the interactivity that linear TV programs are starting to offer, then you give the subscriber the best of both worlds." Tudisco added that "while what most of the cable operators are doing right now is simply trying to get their storage capacity up to a level where it will be able to house all the content from all the new programming deals they're making, we believe that, once all that capacity is in place, they'll be ready to start looking at these other applications early in 2006. That's based directly on roadmaps we've seen," he explained.

[itvt] asked Tudisco to describe how Concurrent and GoldPocket plan to proceed with their integration efforts: "What we're attempting to do right now is just prove all the interoperability," he said. "GoldPocket has a client on the set-top box that works with their server side, in order to determine what on the screen is a hot spot and what action is going to take place when a subscriber highlights it and then selects it. Concurrent also has a client on the set-top box, which enables the subscriber to navigate through content, select content, do fast-forward, other trick modes and so on. So we are currently going through Motorola's Acadia certification process, in order to make sure that the two client applications can interoperate on the set-top box without harming each other. In parallel with this," he continued, "we're making sure that, as the GoldPocket client interacts with their own server, their server will hand off to the Concurrent video server--basically telling it, 'Okay. We need you to play this particular ad,' or 'String this particular game' or whatever the piece of enhanced TV content in question is. We need to make sure, when we get delivery of the GoldPocket content that now has these 'tags,' these enhanced TV content spots in it, that we can ingest that content as easily as any other piece of MPEG content. And then, once it's on the server, we need to make sure that we can actually stream it through all of the cable plant--through the edge devices, the RF devices, and up to the set-top--appropriately. So the initial focus of our efforts are on interoperability at both the client and the server ends."

Tudisco told us that Concurrent and GoldPocket expect to "have all of our interoperability in place by the late first or early second quarter of 2006." The companies, he said, "will then jointly go out and start talking to some very specific MSO's about getting a trial in this area." [itvt] asked him to explain the nature of the business relationship between Concurrent and GoldPocket: "What we bring to the table is our VOD installed base, our large VOD footprint; and what GoldPocket brings is their technologies and content, and all their relationships with content providers, broadcasters and advertisers," he said. "They also bring to the table all these relationships they have with the interactive TV standards bodies--producing content to ITV standards is something that Concurrent would probably never be involved in on our own." [itvt] asked Tudisco whether the companies have some kind of revenue-sharing agreement in place: "No, Concurrent is not getting any cut of the revenues," he explained. "It's not part of the deal and it's not something we'd expect. What we expect to gain is that we believe this kind of integration will further the whole concept of 'everything-on- demand.' Anything we can do to establish technology partnerships with folks like GoldPocket, in order to promote more on-demand viewing-- and thereby more need for VOD storage, because if there's a demand for more interactive on-demand content it will lead to a need for more storage--is good for Concurrent. So that's where we see our win in this deal: it's in promoting the everything-on-demand paradigm."

Tudisco also stressed that GoldPocket and Concurrent are natural partners because the companies share a similar technological philosophy: "GoldPocket and Concurrent both believe that, in order to deliver rich video to a variety of set-top boxes--whether those boxes be legacy DCT2000's or the latest dual-tuner DVR's--you need to leverage the horsepower in the headend. You can see this belief manifested by GoldPocket in the server-based technologies they use to feed their client, and you can see it manifested by Concurrent in our Interactive Media Solution, or IMS, which delivers high-quality video and navigation through in-band data channels." He added that Concurrent believes that integration with GoldPocket's technologies will allow it to enhance significantly the capabilities of its IMS technology: "We feel there is going to be an opportunity for us to leverage GoldPocket's technology for IMS in order to allow it to deliver a much more video- and graphics-rich navigation experience even on low-end boxes," he said. "Building GoldPocket's technology on top of Concurrent's Interactive Media opens up the solution to a larger variety of set-tops. The IMS technology uses a very thin application on each set-top, the intelligence lies at the server, making portability to new set-tops very simple."

[itvt] asked how high a priority integration with GoldPocket is for Concurrent: "The way this is laid out now, there is not a great deal of development work on Concurrent's plate as a result of this," he said. "At this stage, it's really more about interoperability testing and Acadia testing than anything else, and we certainly have the bandwidth to do that. Obviously, if as we go through this, it turns out to be a larger development effort than was initially foreseen, then we'd have to take another look at how high a priority it should have. But the fact that it didn't look like it would take a lot of development effort beyond fairly basic things was very appealing to us."

URL: http://www.ccur.com