From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 12:25 AM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt Midnight: Digital Hollywood Day Two: MetaTV customer Celeb sightings and Respond and Commerce get into it
Day Deux at Digital Hollywood and all the beautiful people (and not so beautiful) continue to visit our booth. A steady stream of visitors included a MetaTV customer Celeb sighting – Bob Mah of E!Online paid us a visit. “I recognize you, you’re Bob Mah. Weren’t you interviewed in that profile on MetaTV?”.
Unfortunately for us (and for Microsoft), the WebTV network too an all too inopportune moment to have technical difficulties:
also rumor has it that E!Online’s site itself went down too.
Still thanks to Matt’s quick thinking a backup non-syndicated version was made available and we continued to demo away.
Thanks to Matt and Darryl for providing technical assistance at the booth, today was certainly a challenging demo day.
Meanwhile over at the actual conference, panel wars ensued with RespondTV (xx) and CommerceTV (xx) on a panel (with others) which turned into a fairly heated debate as to which t-commerce model would be embraced by consumers.
“I don’t think anyone will ever buy Monica’s sweater on Friends”
“Well actually I think they will, just look at QVC. People want to buy”
“I believe that revenue will be gained through lead generation”
“Actually I feel that providing consumers with good information will lead to t-commerce revenues”
“I respectfully disagree.”
“I believe the distribution of revenue between netop and content provider will be 50/50”
“I think that the netop will have the lion’s share because they have control”
and so on and so on ….
Each of them pretty much pitching their beliefs and viewpoints from the perspective of their hardwired technology and business models that they hope will succeed.
Actually, at MetaTV we believe that no one really knows how all this interactive TV will be received by the consumer. What we do know is that whatever is put out there better be prepared to change and adapt to the consumer’s feedback. And be able to adapt to changing business models as well as technology.
No one does that better than MetaTV. Thriving on chaos and adapting to uncertainty is one of our strengths that our competitors will have a hard time matching.
What these panels prove is that each of our competitors have invested a lot of money banking on one formula winning out. RespondTV for instance, started to see their bet on advertising, lead generation and ATVEF triggers go south – which is why they purchased AccelerateTV.
Incidentally, not much mention of their recent acquisition or their portal technologies. One brief mention of being able to “bookmark or resume” entry of details on a form in a portal by the consumer after being interrupted midflow was really the closest mention to anything non-advertising related.
So it looks like RespondTV is still taking stock (or possibly regretting painfully – Editor’s hypothesis) their purchase of AccelerateTV.
We’ll see how their story develops as we continue to monitor their activities at conferences.
Over and out for now – Capt. M