Capt Midnight: iMix Exec conference – Day One

From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 7:52 PM
To: *ALL MetaTV Fulltime
Subject: Capt Midnight: iMix Exec conference – Day One

Day One at the Exec portion of the conference, nothing exciting to report except to say that there was an interesting presentation by Scott Landers, Dir Interactive TV programming for Echostar.  His overarching messages and reasoning for deploying iTV services were in lock step with our value proposition.
In fact he went so far as to say “Until you see a cross platform solution for content providers, iTV will not likely be a success. No content provider wants to support 24 different platforms.”
Needless to say he was descended upon by 3 MetaTV representatives as he left the room.
 
Other interesting presentations came from Johnathan Boltax, Dir NBC Enhanced Broadcasting Group who showed tNBC running on WebTV.
Simon Cornwell of Two way TV showing iTV applications for games and sports interaction deployed in the UK and working their way to US soil.
Jesper Knutsson, VP iTV Global practive Area, Agency.com talking about their implementation in Denmark which took a long time. His point was that the main barrier to iTV right now is the inconsistency and reliability of the boxes and the middleware (something that we can all relate to).
 
Then everyone broke into working groups to discuss the 6 biggest challenges of iTV as voted on at this conference:
 
1. Definition of iTV – communicating to the public?
2. Communication within the industry – what kind of mechanisms are needed? Specifically for the MSO’s and distributors
3. Cross platform – what is currently x-platform? What is the minimum technology platform
4. What is compelling user experience?
5. Business models
6. Participation of advertisers and marketers and implication of PVR/Data and privacy
Notice number 3, being very much our sweet spot.
 
Finally, it was interesting mingling at dinner with several iTV company wannabies, telling their story of how they are just “getting started” in this space. Listening to them talk about the state of the industry, the major cable companies, DSL vendors, how it would all play out. All we MetaTV folks could do was nod silently at each other as every other company that was mentioned, MetaTV was either in serious discussions with or already in partnership with us.
 
Make no mistake, we are well ahead of the game in terms of talking to the right folks and absolutely in the thick of the action, just based upon the perception of the marketplace by the attendees here.
 
I’ve run across town to the Kagan conference (we are double sponsoring both iMIX and Kagan which are overlapping iTV conferences here in NY), so you’ll be getting a Capt Midnight from Kagan from me tomorrow and a Capt Midnight from Ruth from iMix tomorrow. Only MetaTV would have the kahoonas to do BOTH at the same time!
 
Capt. over N out

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