Interactive television (ITV) has been around for some years, for over a decade actually.  Long has the industry had sites on providing their consumers with not only the wealth of video content they have been providing for years, but also delivery of polls, games, advanced advertising and commerce directly from the television.  Over the years the main issues to any sort of deployments and adoption of ITV over the years has been ridiculously disparate systems between providers, lack of industry standards, as well as a severe lack in computing capabilities on the set-top-box side of things.  These short-comings has caused the cable folks to move slower then frozen molasses. 

They have been working hard over the past couple of years and lucky for them ActiveVideo is here to move things along at a much quicker pace.ActiveVideo is no stranger or newbie to the television space operating in it since the 90’s under the brand ICTV.  The "fine art" of interactive television development and deployments in the early days put ActiveVideo on a path that is of course all the rage in the IT sector.

That’s right, cloud.

After working with all the limitations and disparate systems ActiveVideo developed a "cloud based" video system that allows video providers, current focus on cable folks, to deliver next generation experiences via the television over the network with all the interactive goodness running back in the network.  In the same manner as we access all of our email and web app services today ActiveVideo created a super lightweight application client that can run on even the most resource lacking cable boxes.  Their platform then uses the standard video transport and combines all the interactive content into the video stream.  They can provide overlays, full applications, and mash up style content from various sources.

This type of solution is, and will be providing a HUGE advantage to the cable industry.  Even though they have been moving things along with their standards efforts as well upgrading their networks to DOCSIS 3.0 there is only so fast they can move when it comes to deploying new hardware and testing/deploying firmware and application updates.  Since everything is network based in ActiveVideo solution it provides the cable operators with their version of write-one, run everywhere.  Once the system is setup and deployed no more updates need to be pushed to a consumer’s set-top-boxes providing quick application on-ramping as well as easy management and trouble shooting.., again, think of all the benefits of Software-as-a-Service.

I had the chance to catch up with the ActiveVideo folks at CES and the week after.  They talked about the traction they have been getting with several providers both large and small, as well as content creators such as Blockbuster.  They showed me some of the applications that have been created for the platform as well as their portal interface.

After all the TV hub-bub from CES a few weeks ago regarding connected TV’s piping in OTT content and services (think I saw a toaster running Netflix), the cable folks have to be even more on their interactive horses to bring modern experiences to their consumers or risk losing them.  ActiveVideo is providing what appears to be the most complete solution that compliments and dovetails nicely with their own industry efforts.