At The Cable Show '09 held here this week, a session hosted by Comcast Interactive Capital -- the cable giant's venture capital arm -- was the platform for these young companies to pitch their products and take questions from a panel of cable experts.

The start-ups (two of which have received funding from Comcast Interactive Capital) all spoke of clearing hurdles that are impeding innovation in the cable space for consumers, advertisers, networks, and the cable operators themselves:

iCueTV: President Michael Huegel claims his company's enhanced television services will expand the meaning of the term "t-commerce" beyond simply making purchases from a TV. The , available for cable operators to offer their digital cable subscribers, provides interactive applications for functions such as voting, polling, reporting, Web services, and request-for-information fulfillment.

SiBeam: The wireless chip maker has developed a way to untether TV screens and allow them to hang anywhere in a room without attaching cables, said John LeMoncheck, president and CEO. The company claims its wireless chips, which are being deployed in flat-screen TVs and source devices that sit on a component stack, can achieve the same multiple gigabits/second data transfer rates on the uplink as HDMI cables do. Backchannel rates are lower, around 50 megabits/second, but still fast enough to allow for two-way communication between the TV screen and components, he said.

TRA: This media and marketing research company hopes to answer television advertisers' questions of whether their commercials actually lead to the sale of their products, said CEO Mark Lieberman. matches data on viewing habits, obtained through partners such as TiVo, with purchasing trends gathered from grocery store frequent buyer cards. The company's Web-based reporting tools help advertisers determine if their commercials were viewed and whether the ads led to purchases.