ActiveVideo Vying At CES for Internet Partner Agreements
LAS VEGAS - ActiveVideo Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud-based interactive services company, is the latest in a list of companies vying for the application provider role in connected TVs. ActiveVideo joins Yahoo, Vudu and others in seeking partner relationships with CE device makers for Internet application platforms that extend over multiple channels including TVs, Blu-ray and game players and smartphones. It’s fast becoming a crowded field.
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At CES, Yahoo and Vudu touted partner agreements with Mitsubishi, Sharp, Toshiba, Sanyo, Vizio and others, while Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung plugged their own apps platforms for Internet content over connected TVs. ActiveVideo is late to the game on the CE side, but the company maintains that its relationship with cable companies including Cablevision in New York, Time Warner Cable in Hawaii and Grande Communications in Texas, give it a leg up in the connected device market.
According to CEO Jeff Miller, ActiveVideo is in 4 million homes in the U.S. already. “We have a head start with experienced deployment,” he told us. The company hopes to be in 10 million homes by the end of the year, he said. What sets ActiveNetworks apart, he said, is its cloud-based infrastructure, a strategy Vudu also pushes with Vudu Apps. Miller said previous attempts to bring interactive functionality and content to CE devices have required significant investments by television and component manufacturers because of a need to integrate the necessary intelligence and processing on the devices themselves.
ActiveVideo’s solution puts the content and processing power in the company’s “cloud network” and streams it in MPEG using a versatile, universal platform that can extend to TVs, Blu-ray players, media servers, game consoles, mobile devices and other CE products. The ActiveVideo client can either be downloaded to a connected device or built into a product’s chipset.
Miller said ActiveVideo wants to make development easier so software developers don’t have to worry about making an application device specific to Sharp TVs, Sony Blu-ray players and other proprietary manufacturer software designs. ActiveVideo’s software runs on Pentium PCs, Linux and HTML, using the language of the web rather than the language of a particular CE device.
At CES, ActiveVideo launched a Blockbuster application that enables viewers to search and browse Blockbuster’s vast catalog of titles without going through a PC to add titles to a queue. The new application will be available via a software upgrade to current cable customers, who can order movies for rental, purchase or pickup at a local Blockbuster store. Via the application, which can also be controlled by an iPhone, users can order a title, see the closest Blockbuster location and check how many titles are in inventory. Also at CES, ActiveVideo announced it had expanded an agreement with Tag Network, a family gaming app for games including Tetris, sudoku, poker and more. ActiveVideo has about 80 applications in its menu.