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September 04, 2006
TVBLOB: An Italian Take On User Generated TV and Video Chat
This summer the alarm:clock euro interviewed Fabrizio Caffarelli, CEO and founder of TVBLOB, an Italian startup that has a new twist on the idea of user generated TV. His company is offering a video call service that utilizes any televison and a souped up set-top box to enable two-way video communications. It is currently recruiting Italian consumers to trial the service.
Anyone that has hunched around a webcam on their PC to call distant family members on MSN Messenger or Skype will like this idea. Personal videoconferencing on the PC has improved lately, but video quality still isn't great.
TVBLOB says it over comes the technical issues of video over IP and makes it possible to make the video calls in places people normally gather like the living room. “In fact, we’re offering people a new way to communicate with family, friends or anyone else, only it’s through televisions instead of computers," said Caffarelli.
TVBLOB is headed up by Caffarelli, 61, who made his fortune in the nineties. He founded Easy CD, a company that develped and sold CD-ROM mastering solutions for the consumer market, moved the engineering team early on from Italy to the US, and after several years of quick growth, he sold it to Adaptec.
Post trade-sale, the Italian entrepreneur tried the villa-and-olive-grove life in Tuscany, but was lured back to technology venturing when he came up with the idea for this company about 7 years ago.
So far the startup has been targeting niche video applications: broadcasting, corporate videoconferencing, and security surveillance operators, as well as licensing the firm's middleware to Japanese suppliers reference designs and set-top box manufacturers.
Caffarelli has invested about €4M of his own money in research and product development. He says TVBLOB’s box does the same kinds of things that boxes from Sling or Tivo do, plus it has server functionality, and most importantly, it handles the vagaries of video over IP networks.
"If you think that enabling broadcast quality video over IP networks is insignificant, know this: in a demo we recently presented in Taiwan, exchanging live video between Milan and Taipei, the signal passed through 25 different Internet service provider networks," said Caffarelli.
The quality of the video and the streaming technology is so good, apparently, that television broadcasters, such as Italy's RAI and CNBC, use it for local studios.
But now it's time to go from niche to a consumer market. The founder is betting that some of the new fiber network operators, such as utility companies in Denmark and The Netherlands, are going to take up his offer to co-market the service along with the hardware.
"The fiber operators need to find something compelling to offer potential customers. Right now, their subscribers are asked to pay a higher price for very high speed Internet, but most people don’t need this level of bandwidth to surf the Internet or download email, consequently, they don’t upgrade,” pointed out Caffarelli, who added:
“There is very little in terms of services that truly take advantage of the power of fiber and our video communication solution, TV-to-TV, is the first to do this.”
Indeed, the system works best with fiber to the home, or the fastest of DSL services, however, Caffarelli conceded that it could work over a 512K link, but it is a stretch.
Currently, talks are underway with Italy’s Fastweb about co-marketing the TVBLOB boxes to its 2 million fiber-to-the-home subscribers. Caffarelli also said that he is working on “a few more channels to market”, including retailers and ISPs that will offer service and hardware bundles.
We think that if the trials prove successful, this could end up being popular with fiber broadband operators, both incumbent and alternative operators. Video bloggers might also be early adopters.
But strategic partnerships with the likes of Logitech and Creative Labs would be good too, to make sure that there is a wider range of peripherals to go with the system, such as cameras, all-in-one remote controls, and microphones, ones that don't look to geeky in the living room or home.
Posted on September 4, 2006 06:51 AM | Posted to Broadband Services | Early stage | Permalink
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