I Want To Change TV: Mitch Berman, CEO of ZillionTV (Part 7)

SM: You are going for the real idiot-proof user model. TiVo is not idiot-proof.

MB: You are starting to hit it! The viewer experience is key. Search is a key component of the overall user experience. The ability for a human being to get the ads she is interested is something new. It is win-win for everyone.

Now you do the same thing with a merchant. Visa has 28 million merchants around the world. There are 2,000-4,000 main brands in that crowd. For those companies to be able to push information to you about their products, knowing who you are, is powerful. When I watch ads from categories I have selected, I earn reward points. Nobody has done that before on TV; nobody is doing that anywhere on TV. That is our ZillionTV loyalty program.

On a merchant side, it’s about the ability to engage you on that TV screen with video, a truly powerful medium. I know you like to travel. Imagine if Visa sent you an ad that asked, how you would like to go to Thailand, and they sent you a video of all those beautiful places in Thailand? You could buy it right on the remote control, or they could send you something through the mail. That is interactive television.

We are adding all kinds of new things as we go. If we add too much too soon, we will blow the consumer up. People are not used to all this on a television screen. We want to take the consumer nice and easy, walk before we run with them. We will develop things like self-selecting ads, in which you can search for what you want and shop at the touch of a button.

Movies like ‘The Dark Knight’ will be the big draw, initially. Everyone in the business will be promoting the newest movies and TV shows. It’s a consumer driver. However, it is the long tail of content, or an extensive library of programs from the 1920s to last night, that ZillionTV will offer, too. We are trying to create a great experience for consumers that is easy to use, with motion sensing: no grid guides, no PC, no subscription or no hardware purchase necessary. We have taken the pain out of television.

SM: To synthesize what I have heard, you are attempting to really simplify the user experience while making content richer. The back end is where the complexity comes in.

MB: What I am saying is that nobody has ever done what we are doing on TV before. And, we are doing it right now. Proving it right now.

SM: Back to differentiation. There is the user experience, the back end, personalization, search, and then you have something in your delivery infrastructure that is proprietary algorithmically.

MB: We are using H.264 for video encoding and doing some things that are based on intellectual property we have created.

SM: So it is the way you stream and architect the network?

MB: Those are two important pieces. There is the network architecture and how we partner with ISPs. We have talked about the ecosystem and the content, advertisers and merchants. We have not focused on our partnerships with the ISPs.

SM: Talk about that a little.

MB: This is about television. When you turn on your TV, you expect a certain quality. You are not looking for pixelation and freezes. You are not waiting for a download. This is where Andrew Robinson, our senior vice president of operations came in, bringing learning from his tenure at Akamai. The construction of that video and how we send the stream to you is critical. What we have done is created a partnership with ISPs. Without getting into the details, this partnership will guarantee a quality of service into the home. That is a huge differentiator because all the other competitors we have been talking about are all going “over the top,” delivering their service over the open Internet. There is no guarantee that someone is going to get a good experience like that.

SM: You are taking the principle of a content delivery network as opposed to an application layer, assuming the service layer is what it is.

MB: There are advantages for those ISP partners to do a deal with us. We are creating win-wins. The advertisers are getting better efficiencies, and they are able to learn more about consumers as it relates to their brand and service level. Content providers enjoy revenue shares greater than or as good as what they are getting today.

We have created an ecosystem based on revenue share where everyone wins. At the end of the day, if that ecosystem works, then the consumer wins big. ZillionTV is going to prove it.

SM: Mitch, this is a very ambitious effort. You are taking on personalization on television, which no one has been able to crack on the computer yet. And you are taking on the launch of a new set-top box in a crowded market. Plus, you are trying to build an Akamai-like content delivery network. You have some interesting business model analyses, that the consumer is overpaying for television today. I am a big fan of ambitious, audacious ideas. But I am also a very big fan of execution. I applaud you on the former, and I hope you succeed with the latter. Good luck!

This segment is part 7 in the series : I Want To Change TV: Mitch Berman, CEO of ZillionTV
1 2 3 4 5 6 7