BOB BENYA
Bob Benya
Time Warner Cable
Bob Benya is senior vice president, video product
strategy, for Time Warner Cable.
How would you say on-demand technology is tracking
with consumer behavior and preferences these days?
I think we’re doing very well, actually. The behavior
is such that the usage continues to grow at a fairly
significant rate. So the technology is keeping up with
all of that demand, and we’re doing some new and
interesting things that we didn’t necessarily anticipate
back five or six years ago when we where in the midst
of deploying: things like Local On Demand and
Photo Show TV, where you can upload your pictures
and videos through Road Runner and then have it
appear on a VOD channel.
To what extent is switched digital video
leveraging your on-demand infrastructure?
We’re deploying the switched solution in conjunction
with our VOD capacity upgrades, which we’re doing
in advance of launching Start Over and HD-VOD.
We are doing the segmentation—the node splits and
all of that wiring and laser and transmitter and QAM
“We don’t need an OCAP box
to launch an EBIF app.”
installation—in a very consistent, uniform fashion.
There’s a lot of kind of dovetailing that’s going on that
makes doing those things simultaneously more cost
effective because we need do the service group
resizing anyway.
It sounds like a complicated work order.
Any one of these things that we’re talking is
non-trivial. But we are widely deployed, and we’re
making a lot of progress. The solution is extremely cost
effective from the standpoint that we don’t have to
rebuild to get a lot more capacity out of the system.
This is one of the ways that we are leap-frogging on
rolling out HD signals.
Where are you regarding interactive and tru2way
platform and applications?
On the interactive side, there are two big components. One is tru2way, and the other is EBIF
(enhanced TV binary interchange format.) Tru2way
is really designed to leverage the OCAP boxes and
other OCAP gear. Job one, with respect to tru2way,
is to deploy the platform—for instance, the digital
navigation platform that’s built in Java that runs
on the OCAP, or tru2way, boxes.
We’ve built our own proprietary digital navigation
platform both for tru2way, as well as for the more
conventional software solution. So for the non-OCAP boxes, we have a version of our navigator
that hits those boxes, and then for the OCAP boxes
we have a Java-based, tru2way navigator that we are
in the midst of deploying. You need that platform
installed in order to be able to support all of the
applications that we anticipate networks and third
parties will develop and then launch on our systems.
So the applications come next. What’s the timing?
Next year we’ll be working with a lot of third parties
who have already started to build applications, and we
will go through a process with them whereby their apps
are certified and are prepped for launch on our systems.
What about EBIF?
EBIF is a little bit different because we don’t
necessarily need a platform. It’s really a less
complicated, lightweight solution to enable ITV
on legacy set-top boxes. That’s the value of EBIF.
It’s an extremely lightweight version of XML that
can run applications on the mass universe of set-tops
that we already have deployed. We don’t need an
OCAP box to run an EBIF app.
What we’re doing right now is developing some
of the underpinnings to support EBIF apps so that
everything is in place in the box. Then what will
happen is, as the Canoe initiative revs up and starts
to test and deploy advanced advertising applications,
those apps will be built-in EBIFs. They will run
across the vast majority of our systems in our boxes.
The focus with EBIF is to support advanced
advertising and Canoe initiatives. We’re going to
have our own advanced advertising initiatives, which
will be unique to Time Warner media sales, and
we’ll also have some support requirements for the
Canoe initiative.
