It's Not Your Father's TV, Part 2

"To us, TV or PC, we want the consumer to choose," says Joe Cantwell, VP of advanced services for Vongo, a leading online subscription movie service and an outgrowth of the premium TV service Starz. "But certainly from a market standpoint, TV is the best destination as that’s where the most movie consumption takes place."

At CES, Vongo unveiled its two-pronged relationship with Microsoft that includes the integration of the Vongo service into the Media Center interface as well as the ability for users to access that content with an Xbox 360 for playback on a TV.

Cantwell is a strong believer in the potential of these deals to help Vongo continue to grow its business, especially the Xbox 360 component. "Xbox 360 has an install base of 10.4 million in a little over a year, and they’re pretty much all connected to broadband, all connected to an external monitor, and I know a million of those customers are paying to have access to Xbox Live," he says. "If you look at those numbers and content consumption behaviors, from my point of view that’s a really attractive installed base to reach."

Vongo also has an arrangement with HP where every HP- or Compaq-branded laptop or notebook has Vongo built in, which may seem PC-centric but increasingly is being used to light up a TV screen. "We’re told by HP that many of those customers are beginning to use laptops connected to some external monitor, like a TV," says Cantwell.

As mentioned in Part One of this article (see "This is Not Your Father’s TV," April/May Streaming Media, pp. 30–49), Movielink has relationships with Akimbo and AT&T Homezone to deliver its service to these two companies’ respective boxes. In both instances, the integration process took time and collaboration in order to find success. "For Homezone, we spent a good portion of the last couple of years working with AT&T and Two Wire, the company that created the box, in order to take our back-end engine and create the interface to work with them," says Ramo. "It’s been a highly collaborative effort. AT&T created the overall look and feel. They would come to us with specs on what we needed to create for them and then we worked together to figure out how this would look best for the users. We did the same thing with the Akimbo box." [For an update on Akimbo’s strategy, see the sidebar "A Moving Target," p.64]

Making all this work didn’t magically happen overnight, but it wasn’t one of the trials of Hercules either. "I don’t know if it was difficult. It was very laborious as we had never done anything like this before," says Ramo.

Luckily, like most things, the first time is always the hardest, while subsequent iterations are able to benefit from the lessons learned while breaking new ground. "Doing it once was kind of the toughest part. Going to other boxes will be tough, too, because they’re all different, but now we know what we’re getting into," says Ramo.

And with all the new opportunities coming online to reach the TV, it’s full steam ahead with trying to exploit their potential. "We’ve proven that we’ve created a stable, reliable, convenient environment for the consumer to obtain digital content. Now we’re finding ways to take that service to as many platforms as we can—that includes our relationship with Intel Viiv, the Media Center PC, as well as through extenders. Also this year we’re going to offer download-to-burn. And at CES we spent a lot of time meeting with potential new partners," says Ramo. "We’re looking at every angle possible."

That’s a sentiment shared by Vongo. "We’re not done. Our deal with Microsoft is a powerful one, but we are platform-agnostic," says Cantwell. "Our biggest concern was making sure we had the system itself, the Vongo underpinnings, working properly. We made the conscious choice to stay focused on the PC and mobile platforms first, now we’re incorporating TV.

"Beyond this we’ll look at any large installed base that has been adopted and furthermore where the user experience is a positive one," he continues. "You’ll see us work with all sorts of companies and set-top box manufacturers that can bring Vongo to the TV in a manner that’s good for the consumer and works within our rights."