February 9, 2010

Ops Pick Jinni at CableLabs Confab

As part of its Winter Conference, CableLabs held its Innovation Showcase yesterday. Eleven companies were chosen to participate in the event where they were given ten minutes to explain and demonstrate one of their products to an audience of cable provider executives.

The audience was informally polled and asked which company had the top new idea. The winner is Jinni, a provider of APIs that search for TV content based on a viewer’s personal tastes.

Jinni currently partners with SeaChange, OpenTV and NDS. (For more, click here.)

To explain Jinni’s search technology, CEO Mike Pohl said, “We’re crawling for emotions; Google’s crawling for words.”

He said there are more than 2,000 attributes that can be put on any given asset - whether TV or movie. Some examples of attributes would be “witty,” “offbeat,” or “romantic.”

Jinni’s search technology could be implemented in a cable system in a number of ways: through an on-demand site, through a TV Everywhere video portal; in the form of an EBIF application; or via full integration into the user’s system.

Marwan Fawaz, CTO of Charter Communications said, “Jinni stood out for its very pragmatic applications. Others may have a much longer term of integration.”

The following companies participated in yesterday’s Innovation Showcase:

• Clearleap - Clearleap, FourthWall Media, and The Weather Channel teamed to create a proof of concept branded EBIF weather application fully integrated with video.
• iLoop Mobile - Demonstrated turnkey solutions for cable operators that enable mobile marketing for local, regional and national advertisers.
• IPgallery - Demonstrated its Advanced Multimedia Application suite called “My Contacts Zone” – via a personalized end user communications portal.
• Jinni Media - Demonstrated a smart discovery service for premium video content, powered by a semantic engine.
• Miniweb Interactive    - Demonstrated how cable operators make use of Miniweb’s “Broadband Content Guide.”
• Pace Americas - The new Pace Home Content Sharing Multi-room DVR solution pushes the bandwidth limitations of MoCA 1.1 and demonstrates advanced video processing.
• Related Content Database (RCDb) - Demonstrated a Java client application that powers secure network communications for Blu-ray Disc and connected device.
• SeaChange International - Utilized SeaChange’s Intelligent Video Platform to show seamless content delivery across three screens – TV, PC and Mobile.
• Trailer Park / Jargon Technologies - Used mobile device connected to tru2way cable box to interact with TV.
• Wowza Media Systems - Demonstrated its unified media server focused on simplifying video/audio delivery for WebTV, MobileTV, and OTT IPTV.
• Zenverge - Demonstrated how its Remote User Interface embedded in video makes all display devices have same look and feel.