A Tru2way App Store? [The Bauminator]
Apple has developed a model in iTunes that many other closed and open garden platforms are looking to emulate in the form of an application store portal. With the cable industry's interactive cable platform - tru2way - the possibility of creating a large community of application developers and an easy-to-use portal for cable customers to preview and purchase applications is the "ultimate scenario," as this article puts it.
CableLabs, the cable industry's research and development consortium, is working to release a reference implementation and software development kit (SDK) for tru2way around the middle of next month. The SDK, which will run on a computer, will allow developers to begin writing tru2way applications without a bunch of expensive cable equipment. But, we're still not quite there yet for a tru2way apps store. One of the things that's been holding the industry back is a lack of true cross-compatibility of tru2way code among a variety of tru2way ready cable boxes. That's where the reference implementation comes in. It solves the critical issue of assuring that writing one copy of an application will run on any tru2way cable box.
As cable operators continue to roll out tru2way ready boxes, its likely that many companies will deploy Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) interactivity first. EBIF is a platform that's more widely supported across currently deployed set-tops. It's not quite as powerful a platform as tru2way, but offers limited interactivity.
Convergence is pushing video into the interactive realm of the Internet. And while we're not quite there yet, it won't be long before cable television makes the move toward true interactivity with tru2way applications.
Sounds good. It would be nice to have access to additional services from you folks using my TiVo. No offense, but I prefer TiVo's interface over your DVRs.
Posted by: Michael | Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 10:34 AM
The DVRs Insight uses in Evansville are terrible. They use the I-Guide software which disables PIP (I could get PIP on my big screen 15 years ago!), it has a number of expansion capability for SATA HDDs, but that's disabled also.
The software has major issues. For some reason, let's say you have 2 shows recording tonight. 1 show starts at 8pm, the next show starts at 8:30pm. You SHOULD be able to cancel both records if you want...let's say they're both on 'season passes,' but they're both repeats, or your DVR is just too full right now. It will only allow you to cancel one of these. If you cancel 8pm and try to cancel 8:30pm, it will pop the 8pm record back up and activate it. It's impossible to cancel all records if any of them overlap. That's just silly.
I could list numerous other record issues with the DVR's, just simple common sense things the engineers at motorola seemed to ignore, but the list probably wouldn't even fit here.
Cable companies need to ensure quality standards with the boxes they offer...I guess they do, but it often seems as if they don't.
Posted by: Ben Katz | Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 05:46 PM