Two year old Israeli start up InLive, has landed a deal with Vodacom, the Vodafone associate in South Africa, to provide an interactive telephone system which allows TV viewers to compete in live TV shows.
InLive offers a service creation environment for building new services and adding interactivity to TV services in any part of the quadruple play and is Israel and Germany based, and was funded on just €5 million just two years back.
Vodacom represents its second major client, as it is operating a hosted service with partner ActivePlay for broadcasters Mediaset and RAI in Italy.
We have ignored interactive TV applications on Faultline for the past few years, because there appears to be little in the way of a breakthrough, but we thought we’d chat to InLive to see if that’s changed.
‘Our system can take interactive input from the web, from an IPTV remote control or from a handset via either voice or of course SMS,’ said head of product development Amit Or.
‘The system sits on a standard server running the Microsoft SQL Server database, and speaks IP to all other parts of a network,’ he explained. ‘It can take commands from IVR (interactive voice), IMS, SMS or through web services.’
What’s interesting about InLive is that there are TV games played every day in Italy, already involving up to 20,000 concurrent players, who respond mostly through their handsets.
And these are not just voting games. Or gave the example of a trivia game, where each person can answer multiple choice questions, and where the system can remember what previous answers were given by each person and take them into account.
When we asked Or where the revenue was in this, he said ‘Simple, if you have 20,000 people, each being charged €1 per minute and they stay connected to the game for ten minutes, that’s €200,000 and there are 4 shows using this system which are daily in Italy.
‘But we find that it is the big cellular operators that understand interactivity better than broadcasters or cable and IPTV operators, and the breakthrough with Vodafone is important for us. The customers call one number to join the show, and stay connected for the duration of the show.’
‘The system also enables respondents to be set up with multiple paths and games could be played through the remote control on either cable and IPTV systems which have a return path, but for satellite operators it is better to set it up so a mobile handset is used,’ Or told us.
This idea of showing people different responses begins to tax most systems, but InLive thinks it is key to letting people know how they are doing, or dividing audiences into teams, and the system also supports output to graphics to show results on handsets, on the web or on the TV itself.
The core is a content management back end that allows simple set up for new shows to make them interactive, said Or.
So far the system has been integrated into both the Orca IPTV middleware (another Israeli company) and into Microsoft’s Mediaroom, but it is the cellular operators that seem to be attracted to the interactivity. ‘IPTV operators are more interested right now in driving up subscriptions,’ said Or, ‘although we have had discussions with BT, Fastweb and Deutsche Telekom, but at present these are just not ready.’
‘Mobile operators better understand what their clients want, and how to integrate the service, and how to attract the customer to interact.’ The system allows interaction with Live Shows with a call and click; the capability to play along watching the TV show with all of the interactivity placed on the handset. Even shows which are not live can retrospectively have interaction added claimed Or.
For the most advanced services the client end of the system must be downloaded to a handset, and InLive has versions for Series 60, Brew or Java. Then questions can be sent to cellphones about what’s happening on the TV program. ‘We can wrap a video player onto the cellphone itself, so that the interaction and the TV can be played just on the phone, without a TV,’ said Or, ‘although at present that doesn’t really work in the Java version.’
Finally he said, ‘This is the right time to offer interactivity on handsets because many vendors are experimenting with flat rate data services and that will drive up the willingness to react on a handset.’ InLive will be showing its system at the IBC show in Amsterdam, in September.