1. Tvoon® is a logically result of major market trends and is now the top of the evolution....

The reasons, why it comes to Tvoon: Digital broadcast content allows descriptive information (known as metadata) to be associated with the video stream, enabling the identification, location and acquisition of multimedia content

Modern television systems already feature Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) which use a form of metadata, and Internet users are familiar with portal sites which enable them to search for content using keywords.

The ubiquitous Internet provides low-cost connectivity anywhere.

Internet broadcasters, Webcasters and narrowcasters seek to bring their Web-based content to the wider audience of television.

Traditional broadcasters seek to leverage the Internet as a means to complement broadcast content as well as to act as a portal for attracting viewers.

Disk drives enabling local storage, retrieval and manipulation of audio, video and data are increasing in capacity and falling in price. Future projections vary only as to the rate for these trends. We can see by both conservative and realistic estimates, that low cost mass storage is imminent:


Year Conservative - assuming capacity doubles every 18 months Realistic - assuming capacity doubles every 10 months

2000 4 hours 4 hours

2005 40 hours 240 hours

2010 400 hours 14,400 hours

Video content stored on disk for $100

2. Before Tvoon: Year 2000: PDR (Personal Digital Recorder)

In 1999 ReplayTV and TiVo introduced their own standalone products in retail that offered viewers advanced VCR-like digital recording capabilities via hard disk drives. As mentioned previously, these DVR units also feature software that enhances the EPG model as well as databroadcasting content services. At once proclaimed important developments by the press and analysts, broadcasters quickly and continue to invest millions of dollars in these companies because: 1) the boxes clearly give the viewer a powerful tool of control; and 2). broadcasters want to have some influence on the evolution of the software that will control it; and 3) these companies want to own a piece of that action. Due to costs of $ 1000, these units have not met with great success in stores. Reports to date note that TiVo and ReplayTV combined sales as of October, 2000 have reached just 70,000 units in the U.S. Reasons for this lack of acceptance may be because the units are complicated to set up, too expensive (each has their own business model, but neither gives the box away), and there hasn’t been enough advertising or brand development, although this fact has recently changed as both companies have launched aggressive advertising campaigns, rebate programs, and other special promotions around the world. Certain deals made by ReplayTV and TiVo may bring their technology to a wider public. TiVo will be featured on a later version of America Online’s AOLTV standalone box, for example, which was released late 2nd Quarter, 2000. TiVo has also just launched in the U.K. ReplayTV is now packaged as Panasonic’s "Showstopper" debuting the first industry 60 hour drive in October, 2000. Microsoft TV's Ultimate TV platform has its own system. These companies are also beginning to evolve their software and databroadcasting services to create more powerful ways to select programming interactively and even remotely (e.g. MyReplayTV which controls from the Web). Not to forget the TeleFairy-Set top box (see www.telecontrol.de) , which was the first PVR Personal Video Recorder (introduced 1998; $ 150) and still is in the analogue area. Funktions like 100%-commercial-block (not a skipping concept), topic selection, automatic device control of vcr, sat-receiver and tv are still unique.

3. Before PDR: History of the Set top box -evolution....

However, the cost of interactive digital TV ($ 500) rollout has been an expensive proposition for many companies. However, the subscription revenue has not been enough to offset the cost of digital interactive TV rollout.

A case in point is the dismal performance of Microsoft‘s Web TV in the United States. In many of the countries across the world, digital TV rollout is in the process of being deployed. The first step in most digital rollouts is providing digital TV programming. This involves a digital set-top box that receives digital TV programming through cable, satellite, terrestrial or DSL networks and decoding the digital signals to transmit to a TV set which typically analog. The second generation of digital set-top boxes that are being rolled out in US and Europe are promising to offer interactive TV services such as e-commerce transactions, hard disk drive recording, video streaming, near audio and video on demand, email and web access. It is expected that the third generation of set-top boxes shall incorporate the ability to play video games and also allow connectivity of other devices such as digital cameras in addition to enabling true video on demand.

Digital TV is still expensive

The business model adopted by service providers of digital services is one of subsidizing the cost of the set-top box in return for the customer subscribing to TV programming for a year or two. This is consistent with the model adopted with mobile phone companies who sell the cell phones at heavily discounted prices in return for customers using their service to make calls for a fixed period of time, typically a year.

4. The early beginning: Delivery media

The traditional delivery media for television began with the airwaves, with Terrestrial TV, the classic model by which analogues images and sound were delivered from masts radiating waves to antennae picking them up and delivering them to tuners, and on to cathode ray tubes. Since Arthur C. Clarke‘s invention of the geo-stationary satellite just after WWII, things have progressed considerably. Satellite television is the most effective way to cover vast areas of the earth with television services. A phenomenal growth in the available "space segment" has resulted since the first satellite transmissions went up in the sixties, bringing into reality the concept of a Global Village.

Today hundreds of satellite services are available, and indeed these were the first ones to go digital. Another advantage of satellite channels is that they are wider than terrestrial ones and less prone to interference. It is for this reason that no new analogue services are likely to be implemented and all existing analogue services are being phased out to be replaced by hundreds of new services.

The third most widely used method for delivering television is via cable networks. Cable networks make use of physical delivery channels made out of copper or glass fibres. This means that there are considerable infrastructure costs associated with operating such services. Due to the physical connectivity between the broadcast site and the reception site, it is much easier to implement bi-directional forms of digital service, not only television and interactive television, but also World wide web browsing via new types of high-speed "cable modems".

5. Remember how other revolutions began......

The Web, a widely distributed interactive rich multi-medium in 1991 Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, at the Swiss European Institute for Particle Physics (CERN), posted his ideas for the "World Wide Web" to a small newsgroup called "alt.hypertext." His ideas eventually evolved into the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a technology Berners-Lee and cohorts standardized and made freely available to the public;

in 1993 Marc Andreesen and company at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the first piece of software to visually browse content on the Internet called "Mosaic." Up until that time, navigation of the Internet was done through a cumbersome, text-based menu and hypertext links software called "Lynx." In order to navigate hypertext links, one could move around the screen via the Tab button or the cursor keys on the keyboard. Once anybody with a computer could simply buy a dialup modem, install some software, dial into an Internet Service Provider (ISP), and use an HTML-compliant browser to navigate to an address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the Internet became a popular interactive multi-medium - one which has become ubiquitous today. Because this new multi-medium was built upon technological standards such as Internet Protocol (IP), HTML, and others, every capable person and company was able to produce a Web site with or without streaming video. A new solely interactive "new media" industry was born.