From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 9:15 PM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt. Midnight: Kagan iTV summit – Day One
It was a cold autumn night in NY when I arrived at my destination, the Park Lane. Home of the Kagan summits. Summits had been held here by Paul Kagan for the last 15 years. This was my second, but already had that feeling of multiple deja-vu. Even the lint on the carpet was beginning to look familiar.
“Welcome to the hotel sir, are you hear for the Kagan conference?”
Yeah, I was here for the conference all right, here with MetaTV goods to show. Here with a crack (not on crack) team of Jeff, Craig and Peter to show MetaTV Portal Power. Here to show a walled garden (or concrete jungle in NY) of content and services that only the most discerning iTV expert would appreciate.
The morning started off like any other Kagan conference morning, intro by Paul Kagan and a keynote by Hal, CEO of Worldgate. Like the renegade computer in 2001 a space odyssey he set about telling the world how Worldgate was defying Gemstar (or is that Deathstar – sorry wrong movie) with their TV Gateway product. Worldgate champions the Portal he said, IPG/EPG is just another app within the portal.
“Right on brother! Portal Power!” MetaTV’s with you on that one!
And so he did, mentioning MetaTV as a player in the portal development space. One of quite a few mentions by speakers on day one.
Those Worldgate folks are great, our product manager is your product manager (see welcome Lisa and Jeff e-mail) they said, feel free to take more people (well maybe not their exact words).
Panel one was upon us. It was a panel like any other panel we’d sat through over the last 2 days, lots of opinions, lots of conjecture, but this one was interesting. Cable and Satellite operators, talking about what they think the keys are to their rollout strategy.
“One of the key issues at hand is the ability for Web-based content to be re-purposed for TV” – said AT&T BIS of a bullet on his slide.
“Hey there, stop stealing slides from MetaTV’s presentations!”
“At Comcast, we believe that maintaining control of our brand is key for us. We want to own the relationship with our subscribers and to give them a custom branded portal.”
“Now that’s just blatant plagiarism!”
It was becoming obvious, in this town, where conferences were like pictures on a Denny’s menu (you see them but they really bear no resemblance to what is actually going to be served), two of the largest Netops in the US were singing our song. What with Hal (incidentally for those of you who don’t know, Hal was named by Arthur C Clarke by going one letter forward on each from IBM) singing the praise of the Portal too and a whole lot of Portal lovin in the final panel of the day which included a heated discussion of IPG/EPG, that the big P was going to be the theme of this Kagan.
Since we rule with our Premium Portal Partner Program Providing a Profitable Plethora of Products I think it’s all in a day’s work at Kagan for day one.
When DirecTV was asked why he had so many different boxes and middleware combinations AOLTV, UltimateTV, etc etc, he responded that he just wanted to keep his options open.
“Dude, why light a bunch of candles, when you can buy a MetaTV flashlight?”
Ok, I’m getting a little tired and punchy, time to close out another Capt. Midnight.
I’m sure tomorrow’s Capt Midnight will be more of the same, I think this is just like that movie Groundhog day. The ever recurring Kagan conference … but like the movie, it seems to get better each time we go through it.