From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 12:02 PM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt. Midnight: iTVT event at Liberate
Yesterday, iTVT held an event at Liberate HQ in San Carlos. It was $20 to enter with finger food and some drinks served. Jeff Kirsopp and I attended.
Liberate took the opportunity to announce that Mugs Buckley (ex-Respond) is now their new Dir of PopTV. They took the opportunity to tout the “premier” level of PopTV which they announced recently, although when I approached Mugs about it, she pointed me in the direction of someone else who works for her (she has been 4 days on the job at Liberate)
They also did 2 presentations:
1) One from Herve about their products and general iTV offerings
2) One from Mary Freeborn showing 2 apps
– CNN headline news interactive
– Britanny Spears video clips extracted into a VOD Virtual Channel
Liberate also did tours of their facilities to show off their testing room and living room areas.
Overall the event was well attended (say about 80-100) with many of the usual suspects from OpenTV, ICTV, Microsoft, Concero, Folks Network! ex-RespondTV etc.
I had an interesting conversation with Jason/Jonathan Symmonds of ICTV who mentioned to me that they were in discussions with Adelphia regarding their low-cost iTV solution. When I probed further he said that he would like to meet up with Andrew S (probably at CTAM VOD 3/5-8) to discuss once again MetaTV and ICTV content.
I asked him about Charter and Kalamazoo and he mentioned pricing of around $4 per set-top, one time flat fee (concurrent set-top pricing) which gave the netop the basic iTV service from ICTV. He said that this pricing was playing well with the likes of Adelphia who are not willing to commit to a full middleware plus solution. He also mentioned that the Adelphia folks had nothing but great things to say about MetaTV.
Everyone who I bumped into their first words to me were “Congratulations on the Cox deal”. It’s likely to be the opening statement of choice at the next few events including the March CTAM VOD conference where we are now exhibiting.
On the gossip front, rumours continue to circulate about iTV companies in trouble. Conversations about Mixed Signals imminent demise continues.
Several Concero folks were out of work looking for jobs (Chuck Schneider – prof services and Bill Baxter – Sales). Cathy Hetzel is still there, she told me that they are down to about 80 people and when I asked about Cablevision (which they had discussions with previously at the same time we did) she said not a peep out of them.
Chuck Schneider told me that Concero was almost completely focusing on iTV now. Their Vignette business has all but dried up. He says that Vignette is in bad shape (not surprising looking at their stock price). He also said that Concero was building an “iTV product” but declined to elaborate further.
– R