January 5, 2010

Interactive TV finally seems to be emerging, so we asked Peter Low, pres/CEO of iTV enabler Ensequence, what's ahead. Why do you believe 2010 will be a breakout year for iTV? A platform that can enable interactivity—namely EBIF—is finally reaching critical mass. The six Canoe partners are aiming to have as many as 25 million households ready to run EBIF applications in the foreseeable future. To take advantage of that critical mass, we have to make the creation and deployment of ITV simple and scalable, which is where Ensequence comes in... The next 12 to 18 months will be the time we all will look back on 20 years from now as the coming of age of iTV. What about programmers who want to customize iTV experiences, making them unique? For tentpole content, many of our customers have expressed interest in custom iTV experiences that enable them to leverage their most important content properties to the fullest extent with a unique look and feel... beyond what a template offers. We call this approach to iTV the hybrid template/custom strategy. When will cable operators embrace interactive TV? It's happening now... Historically, there have been three impediments to implementing iTV: no technology platform and scale; no business model; and the sheer complexity of creating one interactive TV experience for every cable set-top box and user agent. EBIF fixes the platform issue; and Canoe is creating the business model. We feel we address the complexity and scale issue. What about operators' local inventory? We will be helping operators to embed interactivity in their LAS inventory, which will drive the effectiveness of advertising and therefore ad sales revenue... The same can be done for cross-channel advertising, making the distributor's local inventory—which is one of their chief marketing assets—more powerful and effective. Tell us about early results from your work with History. A&E's Mark Garner recently stated that iTV experiences we created for History contributed to ratings increases of 15 to 20 percent. We also consistently see opt-in rates for interactive ads at two to three percent, and as high as 8 percent, with viewers watching ads for two to four minutes depending on the interactive features offered in the ads. This is because 20 to 30 percent of viewers with access to interactivity—and sometimes as many as 50 percent—use it for 15 minutes per hour on average. Consumers love this stuff.