Five vendors were able to generate feedback on their companies’ technologies from a panel of cable operator experts during a session today at The Cable Show.
Moderator Louis Toth, managing director for Comcast Interactive Capital, said instead of just focusing on one theme for the session like was done in past editions, the vendors discussed a range of technologies.
iCueTV CTO and founder Michael Huegel talked about his company’s enhanced TV services platform, which is designed to enable t-commerce for applications and services such as polling, voting, customer requests for more information and extended Web services.
During the session “Inventing Tomorrow: Innovations for a New Marketplace,” panelist Dallas Clement, senior vice president of strategy and development for Cox, asked Huegel why t-commerce is ready for takeoff now after previous aborted attempts. Huegel said the infrastructure is in place for t-commerce, the technologies are in place and it’s something that consumers want now.
Sibeam President and CEO John LeMoncheck spoke about his company’s wireless technology that operators in the 60 Gigahertz range, which is an unlicensed spectrum throughout the world. Customers who are buying thin-panel HDTVs are creating a market for wireless companies to send signals to those TVs without cables.
In Sibeam’s case, it can send multiple Gigabytes through the air at a rate 20 times faster than competing wireless solutions, and it can re-route the beams around line-of-sight obstacles.
In response to a question by Time Warner Cable’s Mike Hayashi, executive vice president of advanced engineering, about whether Sibeam is looking to target existing devices such as set-top boxes and TVs, LeMoncheck said that while his company can provide its technology via dongles and upgrades, the main focus is to be integrated into new set-top boxes and TVs.
TRA, Verivue and Vyatta also presented their technologies to the panelists.
