The Diffusion Group analyst Colin Dixon offers an indictment of Canoe Ventures in a new report about PayTV and online video. He says Canoe — which has a reported $150 million from its cable company parents to create an addressable TV advertising platform — is going at it all wrong by setting itself up in opposition to the Internet.
David Verklin, Canoe’s CEO, recently said that by using new solutions such as Canoe
and Tru2way, cable will be able to “…give the Internet a run for our money.” While a
decent sound bite, this is entirely the wrong way to view the Internet. The Internet is not
an enemy to be defeated; it is a technology to be leveraged. By setting Canoe
against the Internet, Verklin is putting the cable industry at a huge disadvantage.
Dixon says rather than retrofit cable systems to act like the web, they should just use the web. Canoe’s products — voting, e-commerce, interactive ads — would be simpler and better if delivered via a web browser, he writes. Then he pulls off his mask and reveals himself as Boxee CEO Avner Ronen. OK, not really, but here are his core arguments:
- Existing set-top boxes don’t have the computing power to truly support Canoe-like applications.
- The Tru2way platform, which Canoe will use, is new, untested and not yet widely deployed.
- Because Tru2way and the older EBIF format are proprietary, Canoe won’t be as nimble as applications released on the web.
- Being proprietary will also make it hard to port anything from the Canoe experience onto the web and onto other devices.
- And it will also complicate integrating social web stuff like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, which Dixon thinks users will soon come to expect from their TVs.
- The web already has voting, polling, request for information, e-commerce, and interactive advertising.
If you want to watch for yourself David Verklin’s pitch to Internet folk about why Canoe Ventures is the future, check out the video archive of his call to arms at our NewTeeVee Live conference last November.
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