August 5, 2008

Software Expert on EOD and Navigation

By Jonathan Tombes

The daily grind of trade journalism is at once improved and complicated by subject matter experts who can explain complexities with ease and charm. The improvement is obvious: An authoritative technologist who unravels mysteries in intelligible sentences is a precious commodity.

Less clear is the downside. But consider the challenges to hitting deadlines that emerge from a conversation that extends from 15 minutes to 2 hours or what seems like a half-day shift. Exaggeration aside, several years ago I had an interview with senior engineer from Time Warner Cable that turned into a seminar on Interactive Services Architecture (ISA) and, more generally, object-oriented software. At the end of it, I came away both enlightened and wondering where the day had gone.

The seminar leader in question was John Callahan, who joined ActiveVideo Networks this week as chief technology officer, as per this week's press release. What follows is an excerpt from a relatively brief and lightly edited interview with Callahan, conducted prior to his officially joining ActiveVideo, the company formerly known as ICTV and which touts "Web-infused television."

- Jonathan Tombes

What about the user experience side of the equation - how should the industry be aiming to improve that amidst so much change?

Everything on demand was an internal phrase that was coined back in 1995 with Jim Chiddix and his team at Time Warner Cable. That's really been the focus of everything that I've done since at Time Warner Cable and with a plethora of vendors over the years. We've always had a vision ultimately of a unicast world.

Of all the channels of video that are out there, there's only one that's important, and that's "my channel." The whole user experience should be oriented toward an intelligent network serving up the content in a way that's easily navigable and intuitive. My high water mark has always been Apple. That level of polish and intuitiveness and ease of use is what we've been after for quite a while.

So personalized video, "my channel," is where I find the things I'm interested in. And where they're sourced from should become irrelevant: whether it's coming off of a satellite in real time in a linear broadcast; whether it happens to be cached in the network as a VOD asset; or whether it's on a home network, either on my DVR or some other content store.

Finally, as has happened over the last two years, the Internet has become a viable transmission platform for video. As the bandwidth continues to march ever greater, Gigabit to 10 Gigabit and beyond, the use of the Internet is obviously shifting to make it an entertainment medium. So again, whether that entertainment comes from any of the traditional sources, or from Internet sources, the user experience should make that irrelevant to the majority of our customers.

How much room for maneuver - how many degrees of freedom - do vendors such as ActiveVideo have in a world of the Mystro Digital Navigator and Comcast's own guide and other existing parameters?

The implication to the degrees of freedom question is that those (deployed) set-top boxes are a unique niche for software development; that they are developed and owned by companies and that the hardware they run on is not typically a powerful multi-application platform such as a PC. There are some real technical issues to deal with. I think the degrees of freedom question, though, is really getting to be a better and better story, over the 15 years that I've been around.

Back in the day, the GI platform, the S-A platform, Zenith, Oak, all those different boxes out there really didn't have any concept of a consistent platform for the purpose of software development. Over the last decade, the industry has started to realize that software application development is an expensive endeavor and that you want to defray that cost over a lot of opportunities.

You don't want to lose control of your platform. So certainly the operators have always and will continue to exert the control that's necessary in the best interest for their business.

Technically, though, what's come on the scene in the last five or eight years - and I hesitate to sound like hype at a trade show - is the advent of a Java platform for what's now called tru2way and a lightweight scripting platform that could be highly consistent - if not dead-on the same across all of the operators - using the EBIF scripting, a lightweight user agent. So the degrees of freedom question is really better than it has ever been, and operators are looking to take advantage of that.

I think that ActiveVideo Networks is in a position to help them because there is certainly complementary and easy integration onto those platforms.

Did I just say "easy"? I should never say easy integration. More easy than it used to be, how is that?