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The industry's best reporters and commentators bring you their views and analysis of the world of future TV.


Cover Story - Chain Reaction
 May/June 2005

Asia Watch - Going DTH in India
May/June 2005

Broadband - The Long and Winding Road
May/June 2005

US Cable Operators: It's all about the Bundle
May/June 2005

Review - Content to Travel
May/June 2005

IPTV - Telecom Video
May/June 2005

Wireless Watch
May/June 2005

 

 Viewers' pulse measured
RespondTV is a three-year old interactive TV organisation established in the US, and now expanding in Europe, having arrived a couple of months ago. Advanced-television.com's Tony Morbin spoke to RespondTV's Managing Director International, Kevin Morrison to see what his company has to offer, and how it is making its presence felt.

Morrison: "We are currently educating people about what we do via a DVB showcase in April. The company is essentially a provider of technology for enhanced TV and TV portal products, including tool kits for cross-platform development.

"The company has a good investment portfolio, and our investors do help (RespondTV's investors include AT&T Broadband, Comcast Interactive Capital, GE Capital, Integrity Partners, Liberty Digital, Sequoia Partners, Showtime Networks, Tribune Ventures, and United Television)."

ATV: What does Respond's technology offer to operators that will help them roll out interactive services?

Morrison: "We go to cable operators and satellite operators to provide a compelling back-end which will deliver a full enhanced TV offering.

"This back end infrastructure includes class A high security cabling data centre which is essential, say on a Doccis cable platform.

"One particular difficulty we deal with is the huge spikes of traffic which occur when you add an interactive element to your programming. Up to 50 per cent of the audience could click at the same time creating a very sharp spike (of return path traffic. We use a casistic algorithm to roll down the peak so that it appears to the user that they have been responded to in hundreths of a second.

"We build a high performance back end, including appropriate networks, for operators to deliver ecommerce solutions, providing the banking interface software."

ATV: Given the billions being spent on infrastructure upgrades, couldn't operators develop their own solution?

Morrison: "Yes, operators could build the system themselves, and some decide to do so - but then they find it is a slow and expensive process. We speed up time to market and our also a more economic option as our system enables one implementation to be used for multiple operators or operations of a single operator.

ATV: Presumably you provide the security assurance to allow t-commerce. How does that work, and how does it integrate with existing systems?

Morrison: " Our system is built using SSL 128 bit encryption with triple DES - the same as used for ATM. The encryption is our own, and works with the other encryption systems used such as set tops, smart cards, or other SIMs and conditional access systems. As a result we can even add functionality such as payment by cell phones."

ATV: Is RespondTV more directed at enhancing existing content, or creating content in your own format? How does your system fit in to the production process and how does it work with other formats used by an operator?

Morrison: " The system is written to interface with various middleware software. Although we do have our own middleware, more usually we run on other vendors' middleware, such as the new Liberate 1.2.6. Our standard is HTML, using standard browser technology. MHP compliance is expected in seven or eight days (by publication), and we will be launching an MHP compliant server at NAB this year to prove the concept.
"We are the first provider of a product called PDK which produces development tools for producers and advertisers. By writing to this PDK, developers can make their product enhanced TV enabled. It interfaces the programming with broadcasting systems, identifying where interactivity is required, taking the relevant content to the consumer via the cable plant, knowing where to carrousel the data (at a data centre) and play out to the set top or server.

"The backend builds up a profile of viewers, what and when they watch, creating demographic and pyschographic profiles. We can then play out content to specific profiles or demographies."

ATV: Obviously that raises all sorts of privacy issues. From the consumers point of view, do they opt in or opt out of such a system, and are they informed about what is happening?

Morrison: "Users can opt in, or opt out, on the fly, depending how the operator has configured the system. It can handle both options. We allow the operator to make the decision as to which method is most appropriate for their business.

"We also provide other backend data-handling services rather than sending the raw data to a fulfilment house. Most set tops now have individual identification, so we can see via the box id or cookies who is clicking what, receiving the information sent over the back channel.
"The real issue in privacy of data is how you use it. As long as you let people know what's being done, then many of their concerns are dispelled."

ATV: A lot of your work has previously dealt with interactive advertising - are you more oriented toward advertising or programming?

Morrison: "Its very difficult to say which is the most important. About 70 per cent of the company's business is 30 second spots right now, particularly on the direct response side. This may change more to programming over time - but for now its fair to say that the lion's share of our business is advertising. We may change to more programming, over time."

ATV: Who pays to add Interactivity to programming? Is it the channel, the operator, the advertiser or the consumer?

Morrison: "That's still very much an undecided issue. We did a rock concert in the US, enhanced within a couple of minutes of playout, adding the ability to buy CDs (something currently illegal in the UK) and saw a purchase rate of 22 per cent. The UK is starting to relax its restrictions on editorial matters, so you'll soon be able to buy gardening tools related to a specific prgramme. That kind of revenue ensures interactivity pays for itself."

ATV: How do you view the relative merits of enhanced TV compared to WebTV or pure interactive TV?

Morrison: "Broadcasters are not keen for viewers to be pulled off to micro sites, nor for them to use the advertising break to run other services.
"Consequently Respond TV now views enhanced TV as the most suitable vehicle for the larger market. We have supplied some 100 companies to date and have now got it down to a fine art. (RespondTV's content partners include programmers Bloomberg Television, Chris-Craft, Scripps Networks (DIY, Food Network, HGTV), Showtime Networks (FLIX, Showtime, Sundance Channel), Tribune, and Advertisers 1-800 flowers.com, Ad Council, American Airlines, Allstate, Coca-Cola, CDNOW, Domino's Pizza, epicurious.com, E-LOAN, Ford, Goodyear, Hotjobs.com, Nissan, Ralston-Purina, Safeway, and Sears).
"We add impulse selection - using the remote - say to order pizza as a rapid transaction, where the set top already stores the pin code, and your last order as a default, so if you want could simply change toppings or add a drink.
Do we favour enhanced TV? Very much so. Although the pizza purchase is a classic rapid transaction, it is more usual to order extra details on a product, such as a car, rather than the product itself."

ATV: Do you have a preference over cable, satellite or any other platform and where is most of your activity?

Morrison: "We can already supply cable, DTT and DTH. We are talking to Sky, though we are probably more pertinent to cable where the connection is always hot, and interactivity is very impulse led. Sky also has its own Open service.
"For satellite and digital terrestrial we are able to work with a dial-up back channel. There are some new DTT tenders out, a lot happening all over Europe and we are already close to several European cable and future DTT operators.
"We will be making announcements shortly relating to cable and DTT companies in Europe."
(While no locations were specified, later in the conversation reference was made to handling Spanish content, which provides a strong clue).
"We are not talking to xDSL until they reach the numbers of subscribers to make that attractive.

ATV: How would you characterise your move to Europe and what you've done here to date?

Morrison: "Respond TV has only been in Europe a couple of months, and initially we are educating people to what we are doing. This month (April) we launch our DVB showcase.
"We have a digital headend server in London with our server essentially replicating a cable headend using Doccis standards. We can handle 40,000 http requests per second - which is already pretty big, but we can scale up algorithmically. The headend uses Sun architecture and an iPlanet Web Server. Many of the staff come from an OLTP background in telecoms and finance where they are used to dealing with huge volumes of transactions.

"Our job is to deliver speed to market for cable operators wishing to add interactivity. We have a proven system which we can build for clients in a matter of weeks - at a cost of some $2million to $3 million compared to around $20 million for alternatives." (However, additional associated costs not paid to RespondTV - could result in expenditure of around $10 million to get a cable network running interactive services using the RespondTV system).

"Our biggest advantage is that we can build a fully integrated system in 12 weeks, compared to 12 to 24 months if a company builds its own. We can do it faster because itùs a compact build. It can be more economic because a server can supply several operators from one location. It also suits companies with multiple franchise, again served from the one location.

"Our European arm is going to be one of the most rapid success stories for the company. There has been a delay in the roll out of high spec set tops in the US, and the quantities are low. So for the next 24 months Western Europe will be one of the main markets for the group - especially the next 18 months."

RespondTV KEY FACTS

Originally founded in 1998 in the United States on the assumption that Internet-based technologies would dominate, RespondTV instigated the development of its European presence in September, 2000.

In August 1999, RespondTV aired the first standards-based ecommerce broadcast. The company has experience from the cable, programming and technology fields with employees coming from Time Warner (Full Service Network), CBS, Discovery, ZDTV (now TechTV), AOL, Apple, Oracle, ReplayTV, Excite@Home.

Technology
Addressing the interactive TV market, RespondTV has developed a server network capable of handling responses from television-sized audiences. RespondTV employs load-balancing and distributed database technology to ensure maximum availability for iTV content.

RespondTV is platform agnostic and uniquely compatible with both standards-based and proprietary enhanced TV systems. RespondTV's platform partners include Liberate, Microsoft, OpenTV, PowerTV, and WorldGate.

Headquarters RespondTV heads up its European operations from London. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, RespondTV also has offices in Los Angeles and New York.

Key Milestones

September 2000
RespondTV expands internationally and opens its European operations in the UK.

August 2000
RespondTV acquires AccelerateTV expanding its breadth of services to include back-end infrastructure and commerce services for TV portals.

July 2000
RespondTV becomes AT&T Broadband's preferred enhanced TV infrastructure provider.

May 2000
RespondTV receives Series C financing from AT&T Broadband, Comcast Interactive Capital, GE Capital, Liberty Digital, Networks, Tribune Ventures, and United Television.

December 1999
RespondTV and Bloomberg goes live 24/7 with enhanced programming

August 1999
RespondTV, Domino's Pizza and KBHK launch one of the first commerce on TV enhanced advertisement

RespondTV: Coca Cola
The Coca-Cola Company and RespondTV, launched an enhanced advertisement for the Coca-Cola holiday Polar Bear TV ad campaign aired on 35 cable/network channels and more than 600 local broadcast stations. During the five-week run, the enhanced campaign received nearly 5,000 responses and over 2,300 total completed transactions from 48 of the American states.