CTAM EUROSUMMIT ’10 – BUDAPEST. Cable should become the aggregator of aggregators, according to Joshua Danovitz, VP of TiVo’s international business.
Opening this year’s CTAM EuroSummit event, Danovitz said the consumer was feeling disenfranchised from the industry and it was the job of the cableco to help them. “We’re bringing out more features and more technology and the poor consumer feels they have to crawl over all these things in order to get to the content we want to give them.”
In a subtle promotion for the TiVo technology, Danovitz explained operators were moving from the denial of over the top movie services such as Netflix to letting their customers have direct access to third party content. Search and discovery was, he said, one of the greatest challenges now facing operators. “To deliver successful television we need to aggregate the aggregators and present it in a way the consumer will enjoy it.”
Danovitz said it was pointless trying to bolt on applications such as Facebook to the TV and that there was a genuine opening for the company creating a TV-based application that brought in friend recommendations allowing the consumer to bond with the content. What wasn’t needed was a variety of applications each with a separate login: “We’re not used to having to login as a consumer, it creates feature for them, but it creates a barrier again. We’re looking at different types of profiles so that families can have a unique experience without there being a big wall dividing them.
According to Danovitz, cable had a privileged position by being at input one of the consumer’s TV set.