Speaking as a computer programmer and web application developer, it's easy to appreciate the concept of "write once, deploy anywhere." All that means in lay terms is that any software developer - given a choice - would prefer to create an application once, and not have to worry about developing separate and different versions of that application for a plethora of disparate platforms and devices. Once you start down that road, things can get ugly fast and in the end, everybody suffers. But if you could develop your widget in a bubble (or more accurately, a cloud), confident that your widget will look the same to anyone who happens to look up at your particular cloud? Now that's a forecast for smooth sailing. And that's precisely what ActiveVideo Networks is counting on with their innovative new CloudTV platform.
Back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, I had the pleasure of sitting down with ActiveVideo's Senior Vice President of Marketing, Edgar Villalpando. At the time, their CloudTV platform was still "hot off the press" (so to speak) and I was unable to get a demonstration due to a few technical hiccups. However, after speaking with Edgar, it was clear that ActiveVideo's new, low-impact model for bringing internet content to displays and other devices had promise. "We enable the creation and delivery of interactive content to virtually any TV screen or box: Cable, IPTV, Satellite, CE, Mobile. You name it," said Villalpando. Or put more simply: "We make TVs smarter by removing the brain."
Cloud-based content delivery has been slowly gaining in momentum and Amazon's recent introduction of their new CloudPlayer is a perfect case in point. Store your music "in the cloud" instead of on your player and never again worry about having the right files or the right decoder on the device you're using right now. ActiveVideo's CloudTV takes a similar approach.
As its name implies, ActiveVideo's CloudTV platform uses an internet-based "cloud" as the delivery system for dynamic web content, keeping the in-device hardware/software to an absolute minimum. As it succinctly states on the ActiveVideo website: "We use the IP connection within the device to deliver interactive content from our data centers, without having to install new software or components in the hardware, including Flash. Any device with a video decoder can read our stream."
ActiveVideo Networks holds the trademark on the term "CloudTV" and you'll see more of this technology later this year when the first CloudTV-equipped displays from Philips begin hitting store shelves. For more on CloudTV, be sure to check out the ActiveVideo Networks website and their YouTube video channel.
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