SET-TOP BOX
The instant replay is killer, but if TiVo and ReplayTV have one killer app, it's the ability to fast-forward past ads at up to 60X speed. To TV execs, that makes the hard-drive VCRs a pair of Valley-spawned evil twins. Ads, after all, pay the bills. "We're the only industry that figures out how to get rid of revenue streams," moans one studio executive.
Now comes the adman's revenge: XTV, a new set-top technology from Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster that brought interactive television to the UK. Sky's XTV-enabled set-top stores at least 15 hours of programs, TiVo-style, for replay whenever you like. The key difference: An advertiser can pay Sky to disable your fast-forward button for the length of its commercial.
By the end of this year, Sky will knit XTV into the set-top box it gives subscribers of its British satellite TV service. Developed by NDS (www.nds.com), a London firm controlled by Murdoch's News Corporation, the box can store programs on a 20- to 40-gig hard disk and record those it thinks you'll want to watch.
Unlike Tivo and ReplayTV, though, XTV isn't an add-on; it will be tied into Sky's digital broadcasting stream. And that enables some interesting extras for users and advertisers.
Sky will be inserting digital "tags" into its programming that will let evening news watchers, for example, jump to stories that interest them, or skip right to the sports highlights. But they can skip the ads only if Sky says it's OK. On some shows, viewers might be subjected to only one ad, the "king spot," within each commercial break; on others, viewers could choose between watching for free with advertising or paying to watch without ads. "We don't make the rules," says Jas Saini, NDS' vice president for consumer devices. "We enforce them."
Sky advertisers, aside from giving viewers thumb seizures, can collect data from the set-top boxes that will let them target ads to the kind of shows that run through each box most often.
As usual in interactive television, the US lags behind. Liberate Technologies, which provides set-top box software for cable operators Cox and Comcast, has just cut a deal to put XTV in its package. But don't expect it until next summer at the earliest.
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