Rose wants to change that with M-GO, a new service jointly backed by Technicolor and DreamWorks that launched into public beta at CES. M-Go wants to compete with the likes of iTunes and Amazon, both of which rent and sell Hollywood movies as well. Rose told me that most of these services are meant to promote hardware or some other kind of product. That’s why they haven’t paid enough attention to marketing and packaging, he contended. M-Go, on the other hand, wants to focus only on content.

Check out my interview with Fred Rose, or continue reading below.

M-Go started as a joint venture between DreamWorks and Technicolor two years ago, and made its first public debut as a company at CES 2012. The end goal is to launch a service that offers access to all kinds of media in one place, including photos and live television. The service launched into beta with content from all major studios except Disney, and also announced a partnership with pay TV network StarZ at CES.

The service is initially available on the web, on Android and on devices from Vizio and Samsung. M-Go representatives told me that an iPad app is scheduled for February.

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Until now, Digitalsmiths has mainly been known for its expertise in providing rich, time-based metadata to video providers, allowing them to index, manage and distribute videos based on the data it provides. It uses technologies like facial recognition, scene classification, object identification and closed-captioned time alignment to determine exactly who is in a scene and what is happening, and to tie that information to video on a second-by-second basis.

Now it’s taking all of what it knows about the videos that people watch to help determine what it is that they like and applying that information to create personalized search and recommendations. Its Seamless Discovery technology is being pitched to pay-TV operators, consumer electronics manufacturers and content owners as a way to quickly offer up more-relevant content to their users.

Personalized recommendations are designed to ensure that viewers get the most-relevant results based on their viewing history and can be extremely powerful in keeping users coming back. Netflix might be the best example of this: About 60 percent of its viewing happens based on content it’s recommended, not from user queues or titles they searched for. With personalized search, Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery also provides results that are targeted based on what the user has previously watched or searched for, in the same way that Google search results differ by user when they are logged in.

Digitalsmiths hasn’t just built an algorithm based on its data set and that of its customers; it is leveraging a ton of third-party data as well. It’s also integrated with scheduling information from providers like Tribune Media Services to enable customers to apply its personalized discovery technology to linear TV as well as on-demand videos.

These recommendations are powered by a cloud-based API that customers can hook into, allowing them — the content owners, distributors and device manufacturers — to build their own presentation layer on top of it. That will give them flexibility to build the system into multiple devices and to provide a universal search for various content sources. For pay-TV providers, that can mean universal search between live TV, video-on-demand and even streaming services. Meanwhile, device manufacturers can leverage the technology as a top-layer search or discovery mechanism that would allow users to see recommended content from a number of connected TV apps.

Currently both Cisco and Technicolor are on board (both are also investors, see below), and they plan to offer Digitalsmiths’ personalized search and recommendations technology to their clients. Digitalsmiths is also in testing with some major operators and content owners, Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger told us in a phone interview, but he declined to say who they were.

Earlier this year, Digitalsmiths raised $12.5 million in a Series C round that was led by Technicolor and included existing investors .406 Ventures, Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures, Capitol Broadcasting and Cisco. That brings total funding to more than $30 million. Its customers include Warner Bros, Paramount, Technicolor, Turner, the NBA and NASCAR.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kiersten Balukas

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Hulu to Offer NFL Content; partnership with NFL gives Hulu viewers access to award winning shows containing historical game footage. (emailed release)

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Sky to Launch Avatar 3-D Promotion; satcaster will take advantage of the UK release of James Cameron’s Avatar to launch a nationwide promotion for its proposed 3-D channel. (Broadband TV News)

Comcast Could Own 100% of NBCU by 2014; cable company could buy out GE’s 49 percent interest in the NBC Universal joint venture for $17 billion in the next four years, according to Citigroup media analyst Jason Bazinet. (Multichannel News)

Cox Upgrades VOD Service’s On-Screen Interface; the new interface provides faster and simpler navigation and is available now across its digital cable footprint. (InteractiveTV Today)

Livestation Rolling Out Premium Channels; streaming-TV startup says it will start charging for packages of some live news channels next year. (paidContent)

Blockbuster’s ‘Direct Access’ Service Goes Live; the service makes all of Blockbuster’s titles available by allowing them to draw on by-mail inventory if a title they want is not available in-store. (Video Business)

ITV Integrates Facebook to Promote Catch-up TV Service; the broadcaster will use the social networking site Facebook to help viewers find new content on its ITV Player catch-up TV service. (Broadband TV News)

Technicolor Partners with Testronic for Blu-ray Services; Technicolor is launching a new digital content distribution business, which will focus on video delivery and hardware, including the management of cloud-based applications and portable devices. (Video Business)

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Through his work, part of a larger effort at the university, it was concluded that TCP, which came into existence in 1981, needed to be replaced by a more updated technology, one that could handle today’s Internet traffic. This updated version would take into account ballooning file sizes, the availability of fatter pipes, and the hyperglobalization of the Internet. In 2002, the researchers offered up this approach to TCP — called FastTCP — as a new standard.

That same technology is the bedrock upon which Low (as CEO) and Cheng Jin (as VP of engineering) have built FastSoft, a Pasadena, Calif.-based startup with $4.3 million in funding from Miramar Venture Partners and Caltech. (The company is currently meeting with VCs in the hopes of raising a new round of funding.) The two-year-old startup has developed a device that sits between a router and the Internet (or any other wide area network) and ensures the faster, smoother delivery of data.

FastSoft’s technology can be filed under the general “Internet acceleration” category along with the tech sold by vendors like Cisco, Juniper and Riverbed Technologies. But FastSoft’s true competitors are in fact content delivery network providers such as Limelight Networks. Typically a CDN has points of presence across the globe that are wired together for the specific purpose of quickly delivering information, mostly by offering up information from POPs that are closest to the Internet surfer.

By comparison, FastSoft’s technology allows you to get the same results by serving up information to one location from another, regardless of how far apart they are, without going through an expensive CDN. This is one of the reasons why tiny the startup counts the likes of Honda, Post Group, Reuters Australia and apparently Getty Images (though I haven’t yet been able to confirm this) among its customers. It also just snagged Technicolor, which, like Getty, is building what amounts to its own digital asset distribution network and will use FastSoft to deliver big production files to remote locations.

One of my sources tells me that FastSoft is also working closely with Internap, a company that operates data centers and a CDN. According to some of the experts I spoke with last week, a partnership here could be a game-changer for data centers, since buying and deploying FastTCP would save them a ton of money on bandwidth, a big factor these days due to the explosion of online video.

What’s Wrong With TCP? Nothing, But….

In order to understand FastSoft (and FastTCP), one needs to step back and understand TCP, specifically how it works and what its drawbacks are: In data transmission, a TCP client receives a packet; it then sends back an acknowledgment of that packet to the sender. Once the sender receives the acknowledgment another packet is sent, and so on. At any given time, an untold number of packets can be mid-transit.

This stream, Low explained to me, is where problems can crop up. TCP is based on the additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm, which slowly increases the speed if delivery is going smoothly, but when packets start playing truant, decreases the rate of transfer by half — sort of like going from fifth gear to second, without the option of gradually slowing down. (See the sawtooth-like pattern in the accompanying chart.)

All of which is fine when it comes to lightweight files such as emails or plain web pages, but makes the transferring of large files such as videos clips painful. As FastSoft executives pointed out, a 30 percent reduction in throughput on a 10 Mbps DSL line can mean the difference between an HD movie experience and a standard definition one. A 50 percent slowdown on a high-capacity line, such as an OC-3 connection, means the speed capacity goes from 155Mbps to a mere 77.5 Mbps.

What Makes FastTCP Better?

The idea behind FastTCP, Low explained, was to overcome the shortcomings of AIMD. He and his fellow researchers found that if they measured the time it took to send and receive acknowledgments from receivers, along with tracking lost packets, they could overcome the problem of traffic overflows and make the transfers smoother.

To that end, FastSoft has developed a box called the E-Series Accelerator, which figures out the fastest way to deliver packets to the end destination without flooding the networks, thus restricting packet loss to a manageable level.

The system can also use intelligence to figure out if the packet losses are random or if there’s a major underlying problem, like network congestion, and take appropriate preventive measures. Getting back to my automobile analogy, it’s like having a speed radar and a live traffic feed along with the ability to smoothly downshift gears.

Why It Matters

One of the reasons I got so excited about FastSoft is because there’s no technology required on the recipient site, nor does there needs to be any change to the current TCP paradigm.

To be sure, nothing is a slam dunk. There are a lot of things that need to go right in order for this company to make it. And they will undoubtedly be asked to explain the logic behind putting yet another potential point of failure inside the network.

Low, however, is confident that the cost savings (by not paying big bucks to CDNs) on infrastructure and bandwidth, along with the ability to ensure the smoother (and faster) delivery of data, is going to convince large companies dealing with big digital files to try out FastSoft.

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