IPTV Corp. is launching an interactive television channel on News Corp.’s British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Los Angeles-based company will deliver the service to 21 million viewers in 8.5 million households. It is, essentially, shopping as a competitive sport, notes Telephony.
IPTV’s channel will feature a fast-paced, competitive, trading-floor atmosphere that provides live, real-time auctions combined with live video. It combines elements seen on QVC Network and the Home Shopping Network along with dynamic pricing mechanisms found on websites like Ebay and TV game shows, creating a competitive shopping experience.
“What makes our channel unique is that it’s truly dynamic,” said founder Michael Reinstein. “It is much more compelling - the pricing is dynamic and interactive in the sense that everything is driven by the market.”
The interactive TV company is also focused on developing innovative video commerce technologies for wireless, satellite and broadband-based IPTV platforms. BSkyB, for example, is working with Google on search and advertisements in videos. BSkyB will offers a customised version of Google’s Gmail on their broadband service.
Sky’s interactive entertainment channels also include Sky Vegas Live and three commercial channels, Sky Gamestar, Sky Active and The Betting Zones.
The producers of the entertainment show “How Gay Are You?” ran an interactive quiz alongside the show enabling viewers to discover their own personal “gayness” and submit a score to the national Big Gay Poll.
Interactive television describes a number of techniques which allow viewers to interact with television content.
On the UK’s Freeview, in DVB Multimedia Home Platform and for the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP), an Object Carousel is used. The set-top box can then load and execute the application. In the UK this is typically done by a viewer pressing a “trigger” button on their remote control. BBCi is the brand name for the BBC’s digital interactive television services.
BBCi is broadcast on all digital television platforms in the UK, including digital cable, digital satellite (BSkyB) and digital terrestrial television (Freeview).
Hulu, a Web site launched by NBC Universal and News Corp. offers TV shows and movies for free, with commercials. You can’t record the shows. They’re streamed off Hulu servers each time you watch and can’t be stripped of ads. But it’s not truly interactive, like some IPTV services, which are viewed on television sets. Now TV is the world’s largest IPTV deployment. Launched in March 1998, PCCW’s NOW-TV is delivered over the Internet to some 800,000 subscribers in Hong Kong. For broadband, PCCW offers 8-25 mbps, up from 6 mbps in 2003.
True Interactive TV sites have the requirement to deliver interactivity directly from internet servers, and therefore need the set-top box’s middleware to support some sort of TV Browser. Both OpenCable and DCR Plus are being advanced as common, open technology schemes that deliver interactive video applications to consumer-side digital set-tops and televisions.
OpenCable is an initiative led by the cable industry, with 2008 being touted as a big deployment year, while DCR Plus is a non-OpenCable variant headed up by the CEA. The NCTA opposes DCR-Plus, claiming it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and recommends the Federal Communications Commission adopt the CableLabs-developed OpenCable Platform middleware instead.
In the UK, you can receive dozens of television and radio channels absolutely free — off the air — via Freeview. Now Sky Satellite also plans a competitive terrestiral service using more efficient MPEG4 compression as opposed to MPEG2 used on Freeview. That enables Sky to offer more video streams — but it’s conditioned on Ofcom allowing the service to go ahead. Sky Picnic will feature Sky Movies, Sky Sports, and Sky One for the initial line up.
Some 8.2 million viewers used Freeview boxes to get their TV fix in the first quarter of 2007. The BBC Trust has provisionally approved proposals for a BBC HD channel, but has delayed making a crucial decision about launching the service on Freeview until next year.
Freeview delivers 40 free channels to 9 million households.
How many free television channels do you get?
Interestingly, Sprint and Clearwire have some 90 MHz of spectrum to deliver broadband. And Clearwire says it will use satphone provider ICO to deliver television. RCR News says next year in Raleigh, N.C., Clearwire will test the mobile video broadcast system and examine the feasibility of using Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum and ICO’s 2 GHz spectrum more efficiently using the mobile DVB-SH open standard. Sprint’s MobiTV can deliver both multicasting and unicasting — dynamically switching to maximize network efficiency.
According to Kay Johansson, CTO of MobiTV, “I think for the Google platform to really be a game-changer it’s going to have to offer more than just an open-source operating system for a mobile phone. It will have to create mobile Internet devices that happen to make phone calls.”
Google, Clearwire and MobiTV could make it happen. The Free triple play.
Related Dailywireless stories include; UK: Free For All, BSkyB: Free Broadband, Murdoch to Offer Free Broadband?, Winner of the Triple Play, Google TV?, Satellite/WiMax Triple Play?, Talkin’ Moxi, The Quadruple Play, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, BBC Adds VOD, and The Free Triple Play.
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