Former iLoveTV CTO to give synchronization platform second chance

A former employee of iLoveTV Entertainment Inc. has broken away from his former shop to sound out the market for a synchronized interactive television technology he developed for the firm. Mike Church, formerly iLoveTV’s chief technology officer, has formed his own company, Desktopbox Inc., to sell the platform that was previously iLoveTV’s claim to fame. The breakup has been amicable, say both parties, and Church hopes better marketing and pricing will result in improved sales for the product. ILoveTV came into the spotlight in 2002 when it joined with the Documentary Channel to trial two-screen interactivity to enhance a broadcast of the film Lou Reed. Using the vertical blanking interval, tags were built into the broadcast to time a synchronized push of web pages to a user’s computer screen, where they could interact with the material within the iLoveTV browser. The company has been touting the technology since 2001 as a way to bring interactivity to television in advance of more sophisticated set-top boxes, but other than the Lou Reed trial with the Corus Entertainment Inc. channel, there has been little in the way of announcements from the company. In fact, iLoveTV has moved away from its original technology to a broader service offering such as that announced for Reuters where the company is building a full-service portal on a fee-for-service basis. Other deals along those lines are coming down the pipe, says iLoveTV’s Wayne Thompson, and the company is working with other developers such as SNAP Media Inc. on those types of pacts that include community-building, chat, interactive advertising and polling for 24/7 sites.But Church, who left iLoveTV this past summer, says iLoveTV has moved away from the synchronization engine without having given it as good a chance as it deserves. Church says negotiations are currently underway to sort out intellectual property questions related to the technology. In the meantime, he’s knocking on the doors of radio and television broadcasters with a revised sales model. Rather than try to control the back-end technology, Church hopes firms that want to develop for the platform will respond well to the offer to sell the toolkits. Low-priced toolkits He says prices for the toolkit will likely start as low as $500, though prices could climb significantly higher for very large events with huge audiences requiring more robust server capabilities. Church also says that he can do a better job than iLoveTV of bringing alternative funding models to the table to help underwrite the cost of making broadcasts interactive. For example, he says, he would like to pursue a sponsorship model of bringing a large company on board for the interactive component. While the basic concept behind the product remains the same, it is now using a gaming engine to push content and URLs to users and now previous broadcast and other events can be replayed in the company’s proprietary Desktopbox Software player. The player remains a standalone application on the user’s desktop. Church has also retained one of the technology’s key usability features, a pre-caching system that makes the experience available to dial-up as well as broadband customers. Church is looking forward to continue to work with iLoveTV. He says it makes sense for iLoveTV - as it pursues its broader interactive strategy - to consider him as a partner when clients require synchronization capabilities.

Former iLoveTV CTO to give synchronization platform second chance

Broadcast | December 19, 2003

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