| Inside Time Warner's Interactive Services Architecture |
So far, we've tipped cable's installed base of 10 million digital boxes upside-down and sideways, to better understand what they can and can't do. We've peered into signal paths, tallied the trade-offs of under-the-hood resources, and mused about how to cram more, preferably revenue-bearing, interactive TV services into today's digital boxes.
And still there's more: Like collecting the revenues that spurt from interactive services. Perhaps trickiest of all are the automated processes to harvest new, interactive, revenue-bearing services into the monthly cable bill. Cable people call this "the back office." The rest of the world calls it "enterprise computing." It's the same thing: What has to happen behind the scenes for customers to turn on, tune in, or drop out.
Right now, there are three revenue spigots for cable video: Basic cable, pay-per-view, and digital cable. Upgrading existing billing systems to add the collection bucket for pay-per-view is generally remembered as agonizing. Ditto for adding the collection plate under digital video subscriptions.
With interactive applications, it gets even worse. There are theoretically as many new vendor "partners" as there are new interactive applications. Each participant in the chain needs to mesh with the billing system, and with any other related plumbing, like video servers. This is always easier said than done.
In today's world, adding a new interactive service to a cable bill is as analogously disruptive as adding a new line of baked goods to a grocery store - but only if the store retools the cash register, re-builds all the shelves, and moves all the display cases.
Nobody knows this better than Time Warner Cable, which first collided with the snarly issue of multiple ITV apps and how to bill for them more than a half-decade ago, in its Full Service Network.
As a direct result, Time Warner's video engineers are well down the trail of a plan aimed squarely at resolving ITV's back office issues. They call it "Interactive Services Architecture," or ISA. Almost everyone within Time Warner's video supplier mix, from headend to server to billing vendors, knows ISA well: It's the big, white elephant in the negotiating room of most major discussions. Although not formally expressed by Time Warner, the perceived sentiment is one of "Be ISA-compliant, or no go."
Here's what ISA is not: It is not a specific product, nor is it back office middleware. It is not a new billing system. It is not the commoditization of video servers, nor an attempt to create an industry standard. ISA is a way by which Time Warner Cable, its existing video and billing partners, and its future ITV and apps suppliers can modify their business software to make it faster and easier for everyone involved to launch new services.
If you put ISA in your hand, it would look like a 92-page specification -a lot like the "Pegasus specification" Time Warner's engineers wrote in the mid'90s (which became Scientific-Atlanta's Explorer 2000 system.) It details necessary business interfaces between servers (set-tops are not included in the spec.)
Translation: ISA defines the language all servers should speak, when they speak to one another. Functionally, ISA decouples new service provisioning from existing billing systems, so that sign-up and fulfillment of new ITV services can be done by the cable provider, not its billing vendor.
ISA components are explicitly lumped into two categories: Services, and infrastructure. The intent is to distinguish ITV products from the stuff used to provision, market and deliver those products - because it shouldn't be necessary, each time a new service enters the cable video mix, to change software used by video servers, data carousels, marketing campaign management, customer service and user interfaces.
In fact, the ultimate goal of ISA matches a deeply held cable marketing fantasy: To make a way for marketers to let customers try new cable products on impulse, just as they impulsively toss a tin of Altoids into the basket at the grocery store checkout. With something like ISA, and the commonality it creates between heterogeneous types of ITV servers, cable providers can offer whim-oriented wares: Sample HBO for the weekend. Try out VOD. Order an upgraded digital tier. Push a button, try the product.
At the core of ISA is an invention of computer science called "CORBA," which stands for "Common Object Request Broker Architecture." (A web search also produced a "Concerned Off-Road Bicyclists Association," aimed at protecting mountain bikers in Santa Monica, but the two don't appear to be related.)
CORBA is a cooperative effort, led by a computer industry consortium known as Object Management Group, to standardize the many juncture points in a computer network. It is widely used by a swath of familiar names: The Weather Channel's meteorology department, Boeing, Nike, CNN Interactive, American Airlines, Netscape, Microsoft, Sun, and on and on.
CORBA, for cable, (through ISA or otherwise) represents a common way for cable operators and its suppliers to link up to one another. ISA is one way to do it. Other cable providers may find their own CORBA-like answers. The important thing is that it starts to happen - because it'd be a shame to launch a lucrative new interactive service without a way to realize its revenues.
This column originally appeared in the Broadband Week section of Multichannel News.