Canoe, the joint venture tasked with nationalizing an advanced advertising platform for the cable industry, has been highly visible of late. After great secrecy in 2008, the organization is feeding information to the press in what appears to be almost a publicity campaign. Most recently, Todd Spangler at Multichannel News detailed early Canoe technical trials with EBIF applications. According to Spangler’s article:
Canoe Ventures in the next few months will provide TV programmers detailed specs and tools for building two classes of interactive applications, following a recent test in which a standards-based ITV application was distributed nationally to multiple operators…
Initially, Canoe will define two ITV templates, both based on EBIF: One for voting and polling, and one for “request for information” applications.
Presumably the news from Canoe is part of a run-up in the press to this year’s Cable Show. Will EBIF be the big theme at the annual cable gathering? Certainly we’re seeing progress in EBIF deployments. As Spangler recounts, Comcast has deployed EBIF agents on more than ten million Motorola set-tops, with plans to roll out to all 20 million Motorola set-tops by the middle of this year. Oddly, Verizon is one of the other big leaders in EBIF to date… though the telco is unlikely to get much enthusiastic attention at the Cable Show.
Filed under: Advertising, Cable
[...] tallies are hard to come by, but we know Comcast deployed EBIF on Motorola set-tops last year, and Verizon started even earlier with EBIF embedded in a guide update that was pushed [...]
[...] Ventures has been laying low since a bout of frenetic activity in 2009, but the organization, charged with creating an advanced advertising platform for the cable [...]