February 26, 2008

Pipeline Profile: Kshitij Kumar

The Cross-Platform Video Internet Experience

Title: CEO, TellyTopia

Broadband background: Kshitij Kumar began his career at C-DoT, helping to build the first generation of Indian digital switching systems for telephony. After earning a post-graduate degree in computer science from the University of Victoria, Canada, Kumar became a technical leader at Nortel in Ottawa, designing object oriented voice switching systems. He participated in the core group designing a terabit router startup inside Nortel - a product that later became Nortel's Optera Packet Core. Kumar lead the IP routing and MPLS software development teams inside the Optera Packet Core. Kumar is the founder of TellyTopia. He has been a member of the SCTE since 2005.

What does it take to implement a seamless cross-platform video Internet experience?

To be seamless, it must be easy to use, very straightforward for both the user as well as the operator. If there are boxes to put in that a user has to configure, integration would be awkward going forward - then that's not seamless.

Cross-platform does not just mean taking a PC and connecting it to a TV set. Cross-platform means going across any media to any other media. If people want to watch videos on their cell phones, they should be able to. If they want to watch it on a video device, they should be able to. If they want to watch it on a TV set, they should be able to.

Seamless cross-platform video Internet experience requires a boxless approach, where the technology sits in the network and not inside an end-user's home. That's what Tellytopia has been all about.

How does TellyTopia support delivery of Web content to cable subscribers' TV sets via existing network infrastructure?

The cable TV networks are some of the most powerful networks out there today. We have big pipes with guaranteed delivery available in a large number of homes in the United States. If you try to download something over the Internet, that is not a guaranteed delivery mechanism. The quality just does not exist.

The quality of service does exist on the video side. We've already implemented that over the last many years. What we need to do is leverage those fat pipes which are already there to bring in other content which viewers are not getting on their TV set.

Basically what TellyTopia is doing is creating a YouTube for television. We've allowed the cable operators to become a mini YouTube for television by themselves. We ask, "What does that consumer want?" And we bring that to the TV set using the fat pipes that are already in place.

What is the relationship between TellyTopia's I Catcher and TellyMaker systems? How do they benefit the cable operator?

That's the technology we use behind the scenes. We've got a set a servers and a set of very powerful software that we've implemented that sits in our captive offices inside TellyTopia's network.

TellyMaker is the globalization part of the system, and I Catcher is the localization part of the system. The TellyMaker is the one that's talking to the Internet, collecting content automatically from our partners and other sources and doing the analysis. Aggregation, filtering, conversion - those things need to happen in a location which has a lot of firepower to it.

What's available to the cable TV folks is our headend, our locations from where we can do very strong localization and personalization. The I Catcher lets us specialize, localize by geography, as well as personalize by individual what is delivered. The TeleMaker allows us to connect to the rest of the Internet and collect all of that content.

The YouTube approach does not work for television. There are certain legal restrictions that the cable TV folks have, the industry has, that were not there in front of YouTube. The cable TV folks need to leverage technology to make sure they are doing all the right things for getting that content to the TV set. That's where we help. We help the cable TV folks monetize the content that's out there on the Internet.

Will TellyTopia's solutions allow cable operators to offer subscriber-generated content?

Absolutely. The most powerful thing that YouTube did was unleash the content producer in all of us. TellyTopia's technology brings that in an easier manner to the TV set. We can create a mini YouTube inside your provider and let you bring that content to the TV set.

As a vendor at last week's NCTC Winter Educational Conference, how would you gauge the interest of smaller operators in this kind of service?

What the smaller guy wants to do is anything that will help them generate more interest locally, inside their local community, and that's exactly the kind of thing we do. We've seen a lot of interest from small operators. We've seen a lot of interest across the board because this is something the industry wants to do at this time.