ITV Feature: Cellcast Launches Interactive TV Service, "Top Up TV Active," on Freeview

--Service Designed for Maximum Leverage of Minimal Bandwidth
--Cellcast CEO, Wilson, and CTO, Quinlan, Discuss the Service with [itvt]

Cellcast Group--a company best known for its SMS-based interactive TV products--is partnering with Top Up TV to launch two new interactive TV services on the UK's increasingly popular free-to-air digital terrestrial platform, Freeview. (Note: 1) as of March, 2006, Freeview was in 6.4 million UK households and, according to UK regulatory body, Ofcom, accounted for 69% of all new digital TV homes last year. 2) Top Up TV offers a 14-channel pay-TV service over the Freeview platform, which it positions as a supplement to Freeview service.) The company, which first announced that it had secured a partnership with Top Up TV when it was admitted to the London Stock Exchange's AIM market last September, is working with Top Up TV to trial SMS-based interactive programming on the latter's Smile TV channel (channel 37), and--more significantly--has launched an interactive TV service, dubbed "Top Up Active," that is available 24 hours a day on Freeview channel 107, and on all Top Up TV channels when they are not broadcasting. The service, which is available to all Freeview viewers, replaces the static "placeholder" that those viewers see if they tune to a dormant Top Up TV channel, with what Cellcast dubs an "interactive visual radio" format: the format consists of an audio feed, combined with SMS- and IVR-based interactive TV games, chat and dating applications, and with images submitted by viewers using their MMS-enabled mobile phones. "The difference between this and traditional interactive TV games services, such as PlayJam, is that our apps are being delivered in the linear broadcast stream, whereas those apps are 'pull' applications that the viewer has to navigate and find," Cellcast CEO, Andrew Wilson, told [itvt]. 

According to Cellcast CTO, Martin Quinlan, Top Up Active has been designed to take into account Freeview's bandwidth limitations, as well as the limitations of the MHEG standard employed by the platform: "With the knowledge that bandwidth is at a premium on Freeview, Cellcast worked with Top Up TV to utilize the bandwidth that they were using for the placeholder graphics on their encrypted channels," Quinlan explained. "By bringing all this bandwidth together--approximately 10k per channel--we managed to scrape enough bandwidth together to support an MHEG application with a mono audio channel playing in the background. The basic idea behind the concept was visual radio, and the entire system was set up to allow the hosts of the show to change the MHEG graphics dynamically, depending on the concept and content of the audio show. MHEG's limitations are well documented and we wanted to build a service that would function correctly on the majority of the set top boxes in circulation," Quinlan continued. "For instance, at the start we never believed it would be possible to display photographic images, but with a neat conversion tool running on the servers, the images are manipulated on the fly so that they appear reasonably well even when the MHEG palette was applied." Added Wilson: "The most important thing about this project is that we've found an innovative way to generate revenue from a very limited amount of bandwidth."

According to Quinlan, Top Up Active makes extensive use of the Internet-based infrastructure that Cellcast has developed for its other services: "The Cellcast Interactive Platform is based on a pure Internet architecture, so we took the same tack with Top Up Active: even the audio for the channel is streamed over the Internet from the studios to Arqiva for play out," he explained. "Strictly speaking, I could run the whole channel from my laptop with my 3G card--outside broadcast for the price of a Sony Vaio! And, since the whole system was built as an extension to our current platform, it immediately gets the benefits of four years of SMS/MMS-to-screen and green button TV development."

[itvt] asked Wilson why Cellcast is interested in developing interactive TV for Freeview: "We're interested in Freeview because of its huge growth in penetration," he said. "We're on multiple channels on the Sky platform, but we wanted to extend our reach beyond Sky. It's relatively inexpensive to get on Sky compared to Freeview: having a channel on Sky costs a few hundred thousand pounds, whereas doing that on Freeview could cost £10 to £12 million. However, with Top Up Active we've come up with a much less expensive way to launch and operate a channel on Freeview." "And because Top Up Active not only has its own channel, but sits as the placeholder on any Top Up TV channels that are not broadcasting at the time, it is in essence available on up to six Freeview channels at given times during the day--giving us as much coverage as the national broadcasters," Quinlan added.

According to Wilson, Cellcast sees its "interactive visual radio" as a new medium that will require the company to engage in a fair amount of experimentation in order to determine what kinds of content are best-suited to it: "We've got to learn how the various different products we offer--dating apps, quiz-type applications, chat and other user-generated content services--are going to work in this new medium that consists of audio and this extra dimension that we've managed to find the bandwidth for," he mused.

URL: http://www.cellcast.tv

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