From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2000 11:31 PM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt Midnight: Kagan – final day
The cooking analogy strikes back! For those of you who may have heard a little about the old Synon/Sterling days where we used cooking and a French chef to explain the complexities of Applications Development, will appreciate that the title of the panel I participated in: “Interactive TV – Carving up the Buffet.” It was just too good of a setup in more ways than one.
We were the last to present (being the new kid on the block) after PowerTV, Liberate, OpenTV and ReplayTV. But before I get into what transpired, rewind to the previous panel where they discussed standards, infrastructure and the complexities of creating interactive TV applications (nice set up). They also discussed how difficult it was to modify these applications after they have been deployed (nice set up again). Then our friend from Intellocity presented <Drum roll please>. His opening lines were “Intellocity is a 60 person professional services firm. We do have a side business of creating some tools called Visiworks, which we will be showing at IBC, but our focus is keeping those 60 people working overtime. (Thank you Intellocity once again for setting us up to later say how many people can you really throw at a project, before you throw up your hands and say, there has got to be a better way … 1-800-METATV?)
Back to our panel, each of my esteemed colleagues from the middleware world presented their perspectives. PowerTV had no slides, their CEO just gabbed on about set-top boxes, not surprising since he was the VP Marketing for Scientific Atlanta prior. OpenTV was a last minute sub that was rather unprepared and talked about Open Interactive. Liberate had their standard Liberate does iTV pitch talking about their only deployment with Cable and Wireless. Meanwhile since MetaTV was on his panel, he had to keep referring to us. “Yes with partners like MetaTV.” “PopTV Variety Pack, of which MetaTV is a participant.” Of course he also threw in Intellocity and AccelerateTV after one of our mentions to appear impartial, but blink and you would have missed those mentions.
Eventually it was our turn to take a crack at the Interactive Buffet analogy. With plenty of former chef analogy experience, the puns started flowing.
“Well the portal is the menu of iTV applications. And you select each item in the buffet.”
“What’s most critical about the buffet is what you do if your consumers don’t like what you are serving. You better get your chefs (programmers) cooking up a new batch in double time and get it out there before your audience loses their appetite. By the way, exactly how many chef’s can you really afford to employ/hire?”
“If the walled garden is where the Netops want the consumers to be, the notion of free range internet is like an open kitchen, where consumers would gorge themselves on junky web sites like this <showing horrible internet on TV web page>. Let me tell you about syndication …”
“MetaTV is cross platform, think of it as having expert so chefs at your beckon call creating the perfect targeted cuisine for your consumer every time.” And it goes on …
Anyhow, we were well received and there was a decent amount of interest after the panel ended from people from the audience coming up to ask questions. Paul Kagan was pleased with our participation as a last minute substitute and we received a standing invite to participate on any future panels.
So ends a pretty successful conference. To recap:
We sponsored for the first time.
Got lots of mentions.
Snuck onto a panel.
Found out that Intellocity is really Unintel-locity.
Garnered (ok that’s the last food pun) some interest and made an impression for a lil ole company that’s just starting to pull their marketing train out of the station.
Thanks for following along and bearing with my updates.
Captain Midnight.
Ramon Chen
VP, Worldwide Marketing