July 1, 2010

2010 Top OPS Awards: Special Technology Vendor Award: itaas

A sure sign that a technology is prepping for primetime is the re-brand. Thus OCAP became tru2way; DOSCIS 3.0, "wideband;" and Enhanced Binary Interface Format, aka EBIF, is SelecTV.

SelecTV made its debut as the industry’s consumer-facing ITV brand in a Canoe Ventures-led announcement on May 10. The next day, interactive software company itaas — yes, another acronym: interactive television and application services — announced it had completed integration and development work with Comcast on an EBIF-based user agent for Cisco set-tops.

The significance? Not that EBIF is only now arriving. The Motorola EBIF user agent has existed for two years, thanks to Comcast subsidiary TVWorks. Last summer Comcast used EBIF to launch Caller ID on TV. That’s going well — 626 million banner pops in a single month earlier this year, according to Comcast SVP Mark Hess.

No, it’s the extension of the platform. itaas leveraged that work for the remaining 25 percent of Comcast’s set-tops. "What we’re trying to do is take that same agent and port it to Cisco, so we have the common agent across the entire platform," Hess says.

Why itaas? Hess says it was a simple division of labor. As big as Comcast is, it too must choose its battles. "We do what we’re good at, and let other people do what they’re good at," he says. And the itaas team is good, having acquired its expertise over many years. "They’ve been right in the middle of this EBIF work, right from the start," he adds.

With rights to the TVWorks technology, itaas has become a kind of interactive vector. During Cable Show week came the news that itaas would license the Motorola EBIF user agent and related software to Charter Communications.

The company is focused, but agile. President/CEO Vibha Rustagi says itaas works with Fourth Wall Media’s EBIF user agent and others, and "is involved with the development of many different types of applications on several platforms, including native, EBIF, tru2way and IP."

Modesty becomes anyone who lived through ITV’s nuclear winter. But it’s springtime for this binary object code. Considering Comcast’s Caller ID stats, the dozen networks showing EBIF-based apps in L.A. and the forthcoming Canoe-led RFI campaign, the code slingers already have accomplished a lot.

"[itaas] has certainly been...very key, particularly to us and others, to make EBIF ubiquitous," Hess says.

So far, Caller ID leads among applications that use an EBIF agent. "Our customers just love it," Hess confirms. But with the EBIF platform now extensive, thanks in part to itaas, there’s more to come.

"It’s still early in the launch process," Rustagi admits. "The good news is that most of these flavors of applications (whether aimed at revenue generation, stickiness or competitive response) are available."

Hess notes that he was focused on the platform itself, but adds that the business will evolve in a big way: "It’s going to be huge for advertising models."

itaas and EBIF — the little acronyms that could.

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