We gave voice to sentiments last week from Opera that TV Widgets may be a good idea, but why should they belong exclusively to Yahoo and Intel, which have tried to steal mindshare for their use in TVs. This week another traditional TV supplier has jumped on the widget bandwagon in the form of Nagravision winning a deal at France’s Numericable to use its own widget platform, in the creation of a new switched cable environment there. Numericable is France’s biggest cable operator by some way.
In a traditional cable environment often 350 TV channels are broadcast simultaneously to every home in a QAM loop. The one you are watching is the one your tuner has chosen to resolve but the others all reach to your set top. The idea behind SDV is that if no-one is watching TV, no TV channels are sent down the cable. And if two people are watching the same TV channel, only one version is sent and they are both given co-ordinates of where to find it. The aim of SDV is to free up tons of cable bandwidth (making it more like multicasting in IPTV) for VoD, HD services and things like internet video. The widgets are then required to make the best use of those types of services from an onscreen menu.
Nagravision has taken some of its own software components and some from OpenTV, a company which it controls, to build towards Numericable switching to SDV during 2010.
A widget is a small, easy-to-use software application that lets consumers interact with online information in a graphically appealing way. It creates a targeted and familiar environment with recommendation of relevant data for consumers, making them more likely to return to a certain service.
Numericable will in particular offer the “MyTV” widget that will make it possible to send program alerts to friends. Subsequently, Numericable subscribers will be able to choose widgets from a large gallery including live and on-demand recommendation widgets, as well as widgets allowing them to share videos and track their updates from online social networks.
Nagravision is not supplying all of the elements that Numericable will need to move to SDV, but some of the control mechanisms at the set top end for the consumer to be able to control the new environment.
Nagravision says that its widget platform will be open and it will encourage external developers to get involved. All the widgets will be built using the Nagra Media widget Studio and is a web-based front end to the Nagra Content Management System and the OpenTV Core 2.0 client middleware and browser.