Joe Conboy, Director of Product Management iTV at Cox Communications, was a keynote speaker at last week’s virtual social TV conference held by User Insight (you can watch a few video clips here). Cox is the 5th largest MSO in the US as of June 2011. In an interview with Lost Remote, Conboy discusses the future of the set-top box, EBIF (the technical name – Enhanced Binary Interchange Format – for a standardized way to do interactive TV, at a national scale) and Tru2Way technologies that are making ads more interactive.
Lost Remote: How does Cox approach social TV?
Joe Conboy: Cox is very focused on our customers and their changing viewing behaviors and we are working to deliver our products in the most useful, valuable way possible. Overall, Cox is focused on delivering content to our customers the way they most want to use it. For example, Cox TV Online, which launched earlier this year, gives Cox Advanced TV customers the ability to authenticate and gain access to thousands of titles via www.cox.com/tv. We are focused on delivering on viewing flexibility that our customers have grown to expect. We also understand that the key part of social TV is giving our customers the ability to interact with each other about our services. Cox is working within the industry to listen to what television consumers are saying about their viewing experience, as this feedback is very important as we develop new products and services.
LR: How are they infusing social into their iTV products?
JC: Cox’s iTV products are currently very straightforward experiences. We allow customers to navigate to their local weather, play simple puzzlers and card games. We offer cross platform interactivity with TV Caller ID. Cox also offers Zone Channels which create a mini guide experience, allowing customers to quickly scan 6 live feeds at once and select the channel they want to watch within three different genres: kids, news and sports. Through our participation in Canoe and deployment of EBIF, our customers can interact with advertising; ask for more information or participate in a live poll. The growth of EBIF and Tru2Way platforms within the Cox footprint, along with the expanding universe of tablets in the home will allow for faster and easier introduction of useful social TV applications going forward.
LR: Will MSOs will ease control over content?
JC: Cox’s business is primarily subscription based, and that includes protecting the content rights of our program partners who also derive a significant % of their revenues through subscription fees. If our programming partners were to want to move toward offering free advertising-supported content we could support that as well.
LR: How can the set top box Cox provides be improved?
JC: Cox and other MSOs continue to ask ourselves how to improve upon set top boxes since the equipment was introduced. Set top box functionality has steadily improved, and the latest versions include a Docsis 3.0 modem, 500 GB of storage and a Tru2Way interactive platform, which dramatically improve processing speed. We are evolving how we deliver content to the television, computers and smartphones, changing from the traditional QAM based infrastructure to an IP based platform. There will surely be a lot of exciting changes to the entire cable infrastructure in the next 3-5 years.
