January 12, 2007

Telephone on TV

By Jim Barthold

If there's any certainty about what's going to happen in 2007, it's the thought that talking is only going to be one minor function of what a telephone is all about, as even the carriers are demonstrating.

"I see an opportunity for us to evolve the business as we change technologies and we move from that voice-dominated, voice-oriented business ... circuit-switched world into a data world," said Richard Notebaert, chairman/CEO of Qwest Communications speaking at the Citigroup 17th Annual Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas this week.

Hunt Norment, speaking from the Scientific Atlanta booth at CES, probably didn't hear Notebaert's comments, but he probably concurred anyway. Norment is vice president of business development and marketing for Integra5, and he's bringing the telephone to the TV set via short message service (SMS) text delivery. Like Switch-Mobile, this involves a wireless phone, and, again like Switch-Mobile, it doesn't necessarily involve Sprint Nextel, although it does involve a landline phone.

"We integrate with various SMS centers, and when an SMS is being sent to a landline – and that's a big difference here, an SMS to a landline phone – we pick that up and display that on the TV and the PC, and we actually take it through the cable system to do that," Norment said.

It's an application better suited to IPTV – and thus better suited to a telco, where there's also interest – but Integra5's heart belongs to cable, so the vendor is offering it first to its friends in the MSO community.

"We can make this work in a legacy cable environment," he said. "The cable companies don't have to put set-top boxes in; they don't have to upgrade to IMS to make this work. We bridge that gap for them," he said.

Network-based

The Integra5 system is network-based and includes a small client on the set-top box that understands how to present information on the TV set.

"There's no heavy client software, no SIP software, anything like that on the set-top boxes. Our server is in the headend, and that's what allows you to get to the cable plant," he said.

SMS on TV may never be as popular as caller ID on TV – more phone text that shows up on the screen – but it has its niche, Norment said, because "it's largely a generational thing. The younger demographics are typically the ones that use SMS," he said.

So obviously you're not talkin' 'bout my generation, as The Who have intoned.

The idea, he said, has taken off in what's growing as a converged services proving ground - Europe - where "a lot of the European wireless operators have partnerships with the cable operators to allow that type of functionality," he concluded.

- Jim Barthold