From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 12:18 AM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt Midnight: Running with the Big Dogs
Quiz: How do you get to be a big dog?
Answer: When you hang with the other big dogs in the neighborhood and no one blinks an eye because you belong.
That’s exactly what happened this week in NYC when we took our public speaking presence to the next level.
On Thursday 9/21, Andrew Lev participated at SBCA (Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association) Skyforum on a panel about Interactive television which featured the biggest and most significant players in the Satellite/iTV deployment space. The setting, the Marriot Marquis, in a huge ballroom with the stage lit up with 7 leather chairs arranged to face the audience in an atmosphere which included 40 x 40 Screens, TV cameras and a packed house attended by the leading players in the satellite space.
The panel was moderated by David Leiberman of USA Today and included, executives from DirecTV, Echostar, Wink, Liberate, our good friends Pegasus and of course Andrew representing MetaTV.
Here are a few highlights (paraphrasing in most cases, selecting the key points from the 60 minute panel, and listing mainly Andrew’s repsonses):
David Leiberman: “So who exactly here is deployed?”
DirecTV: “We intend to deploy late this year”
Echostar: “In theory, we are already deployed with our DishPlayer service”
Wink: “We are deployed right now but will be turning on substantially more homes by the end of the year”
Pegasus: “We will be deployed some time next year”
David L:”What exactly makes you think that consumers will adopt iTV?”
Andrew L:”The precedent is BskyB in Europe, that service has been extremely successful and has generated significant revenues since its launch …”
David L:”Maybe so, but don’t you think that is because of the lack of PC penetration in the UK? With the US households substantially more equipped to surf the Internet
through the PC don’t you think that iTV would just be ho-hum to most Americans?”
Andrew L:”Actually, we believe that most US households will embrace the iTV experience. It is true that internet adoption is low in the UK and they have being using Teletex for a number of years, but that does not mean that US will not adopt interactive TV portals and walled gardens. Actually Americans have been interacting with their televisions, particularly satellite users, when they order pay-per-view movies use the EPG. American’s high use of the internet means they are comfortable with interactivity. Americans are and will continue to use the PC internet for productivity, but will gravitate to their interactive TV applications for a more rich media experience of walled garden shopping, news and weather, entertainment and more. I would rather buy a pair of jeans from the Gap sitting in the living room and seeing a cool video of a model wearing those jeans rather a thumbnail picture on my office PC.
David L:”What do you think of services such as AOLTV?”
Andrew L:”AOLTV provides good content, but what Network Operators really want is control of the brand and revenue streams. Co-branding or utilizing a service such as AOLTV gives away significant potential revenue streams and branding that a NetOp should own. MetaTV helps NetOps such as Pegasus deploy custom branded portals …”
David L:”[To DirecTV and Echostar], you both appear to have more than one flavor of service rolling out, why is that?”
DirecTV:”There are certainly a lot of options, we plan on implementing both AOLTV and Microsoft Ultimate TV to offer choice”
David L:”Certainly it’s a smart thing to do given the recent stumbles on the part of Microsoft [turning to Liberate], you certainly have benefited.”
Liberate:”Most definitely, we have been fortunate enough to be able to offer a system to those operators who have become frustrated with Microsoft. We have been able to provide a robust platform as well as content through partners like MetaTV.”
David L:”Andrew, you’re the content guy, tell us a little about that.”
Andrew L:”Content partners such as Etrade, who are one of our customers, are really looking to leverage their content across all NetOps. If I am an eBusiness, I want to be ubiquitous on every TV regardless of platform and that’s what MetaTV can do.”
David L:”Ok, let’s take some questions from the audience”
Question 1 (from lady from Bloomberg): “This is for DirecTV and Echostar, given you are both rolling our services on two platforms, how do content providers work with you to be part of those platforms?” It is really hard for content providers such as us to create applications that will run on all these different platforms so what are you going to do to help me!”. <wow! MetaTV could not have paid for better question from a frustrated content provider>
<Responses from DirecTV and Echostar follow – Andrew interrupted before the next question could be asked…>
Andrew L: “Forgive the shameless self promotion here but MetaTV does exactly that for content providers, we can leverage your internet assets and create new TV centric applications that run on all iTV platforms” MetaTV recognized this problem, the problem is real and we solve it.
Question 2: Is anyone on the panel affected by the Gemstar patents?
<Is there a Gemstar Lawyer in the house? Quite possibly>
Question 3:”This is another question for DirecTV and Echostar – do you have any plans to deploy a custom branded portal?”
DirecTV:”Well our DirecTV.com web site has been up and running … <interrupted to clarify the question>, “Oh sorry I misunderstood the question, well we certainly are looking into that as an option”
<Another perfect setup for MetaTV but our point has been made>
David L:”Thank you to all the panelists.”
As you can see, we certainly hit all the sweet spots and are running with the big dogs, in fact most of those big dogs have come-a-knockin for our great technology (and those who haven’t will soon) as word continues to spread about MetaTV.
MEANWHILE ….. 24 hours earlier, across town at the eTVWorld conference, smaller panels took place with MetaTV represented in a “3 minute rapid product pitch panel”
with Wink, Worldgate, FutureTV, Metabyte represented. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time in 3 minutes to demo the fabulous Portal Designer but took screen shots and was able to present the whole end-to-end story.
We were a hit once again, with our message resonating with the audience, generating significant interest from companies such as Wells Fargo and even a Saudi Arabian television company!
MEANWHILE …. 48 hours earlier, Andrew Lev once again represented MetaTV at an eTVWorld panel “Couch Potato vs Jane Cybersurfer”. On this panel, were again Wink, Worldgate, Metabyte, Yack.com and Planetweb. Once more, MetaTV stood out as a great solution generating lots of interest.
As we continue our visibility at trade shows, speaking on panels we are absolutely sure of one thing. We are in the big leagues and are definitely being recognized as one of the leading players.
<Several more minutes of discussions ensue on a variety of topics including cost of the box, consumer adoption etc>