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Viewing report
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OCAP iTV - Issues, Opportunities and Threats
DIGDIA, July 2007, Pages: 88
OCAP stands for OpenCable™ Application Platform. OCAP is designed to support applications that run on consumer devices that are connected to a digital cable service. Applications can include electronic programming guides, video on demand, digital video recording, telescoping advertisements, shopping, games, gambling, information retrieval, sport statistics, virtual channels, caller ID, e-mail, and customer support, to name a few – all done on your television screen.
OCAP makes it easier, in theory, for “write once, run anywhere” digital cable application software development by acting as a middleware translator between applications and individual unique devices. In practice, differences in hardware still create implementation issues. OCAP also defines many of the supporting system elements.
Business-wise, OCAP opens up the possibility for new viewer/TV interactivity-based business models. As such, OCAP has some of the potential of what the browser did for the PC, but with some significant differences. Much like the early days of the Internet, people sense that OCAP opens up some significant opportunities – they just can’t say for sure exactly what they are. Companies are experimenting and conducting trials in various parts of the U.S. now. Meantime, Korea (the only other country to adopt OCAP) is a little ahead with their deployment with all major cable companies supporting OCAP now. Infrastructure products, such as the head end systems that serve up OCAP applications and set top boxes that run the applications are now available. Support products, such as development tools and emulators are popping up everywhere. After being worked on for years, industry people are saying that “OCAP is now real”, though some still hold back full blown endorsement of this claim.
Why Now?
Interactive television has been around for quite a while. As some in the industry joke – once an interactive television feature becomes popular, they quickly rename it to something else (for example, the electronic program guide) so as to not carry the stigma of “iTV”. After years of disappointing performance, poor consumer response and failed companies, iTV simply has a bad reputation. So why is it starting to get more real now?
Let us look at the Web for lessons. The Internet had been around in the form of
ARPAnet2 for decades before Marc Andreessen, et al, first created the original “web browser” called Mosaic in 1993. Yet, it was still the latter half of the 1990’s before people began to notice the “worldwide web”.
Much of the timing of the Internet as we know it was due to the timing of some necessary ecosystem elements like the personal computer, networking and dial-up online services (remember when AOL was only a walled garden?). Before there were large numbers of people with these capabilities the invention of web browsing and e-mail (which predates Mosaic) could not catch fire. But, the ecosystem soon became rich and fertile enough and momentum built up, leading to the Internet as we know it now. A similar story can now be foreseen for interactive television.
This Report:
If OCAP is real, and it does appear to be at least inevitable, what are the issues, implications, opportunities and threats? Clearly, with about 60% of the U.S. households subscribing to cable, the world of television will change for both viewers and companies. Everyone in the ecosystem will be affected – viewers, cable companies, programmers (as in television content), developers (as in application software), advertisers, consumer electronics companies, and cable equipment/software companies.
This report takes a deeper look at the world of OCAP and addresses a little about how it works, what it enables, many of the implementation and strategic issues, who are the players, opportunity areas, and market timing. This report is aimed at marketing and development managers that are wondering how OCAP may impact their business and if there may be an opportunity to investigate.
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