It was very exciting to develop this vision statement collaboratively, not only with the executive team but also with many of the early employees of the company. Their investment in the message was important to get it right but also for them to “own” moving forward …
Our Vision
Television of the future will surround the viewer with a powerful and exciting environment of personalized interactivity — and that future is now! No longer limited to a passive entertainment platform, TV is being transformed into an interactive medium with unlimited choice and convenience. Through simple clicks of a remote control, entertainment can be taken to new heights, offering the viewer interactive program participation, as well as access to a wide variety of on demand content, commerce and community building services. Known widely as interactive television (iTV), it has the power to enrich the lives of households and communities, in turn providing significant new business opportunities for those best positioned to deliver iTV to viewers.
Network operators (cable and satellite) and content providers (TV programmers, TV advertisers, eBusinesses and merchants) are poised to participate in what industry analysts are forecasting as one of the fastest growing and largest markets in history. An opportunity exists to bring to market compelling iTV applications by combining the powerful entertainment medium of television — with its wide reaching popular appeal and emotional branding power — and the Internet’s two-way interactivity and transactional capabilities. However, several challenges persist in today’s global iTV ecosystem hindering mass adoption. The availability of multiple middleware solutions, disparate standards and unpredictable rollout schedules of new consumer set-top boxes all serve to make creating iTV applications slow and expensive. Even more daunting is the challenge and expense of hiring skilled IT staff to manage implementations. In short, unpredictability, high cost and a continuously shifting landscape form major inhibitors and barriers to entry.
MetaTV’s vision is to break down those barriers through an innovative suite of technologies and services that enable integrated TV portals, virtual channels and enhanced TV applications to run on any combination of middleware, set-top box and network architectures — today and into the future. By doing so, MetaTV empowers network operators to strengthen their brand, realize revenue streams and foster new business relationships. Through MetaTV, content providers are able to extend the distribution of their content to a ubiquitous iTV medium, leveraging all of their existing assets and backend infrastructure.
MetaTV’s unique technology focuses on insulating network operators and content providers from ever changing business, technology and consumer preference landscapes. By providing low cost, rapid time to market solutions that are adaptable and flexible, MetaTV believes that it is well positioned to be a key enabler that helps drive the growth and ultimate success of interactive television.