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.
Verivue: Founded by a former Juniper executive, this start-up wants to change the way video is viewed. Instead of using the push model, the company has built a networked platform that offers viewers video-on-demand on any device they choose, said CEO Jim Dolce. By pulling content from tradition video sources as well as the Internet and delivering it to a TV, PC, handheld device, or game player, the technology breaks down the boundary between television and online content, he said.
Vyatta: This router maker, started by one of Cisco's first 50 employees, hopes to innovate the cable industry from the inside out by lowering the cost of running operators' networks. The key to reducing costs, said president and CEO Kelly Herrell, is separating the routing hardware from software. The company sells and supports an that runs on industry-standard computers, allowing customers to optimize and economize. The three-year-old company recently signed on a major European carrier as a customer, and just yesterday added a "big cable operator" which will run its next-generation equipment on Vyatta's product, Herrell said.