WebTV EPG - In the Knitting or Deus Ex Machina?

Two articles on Techmeme discussing the interesting issue of how an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) will work for Web TV. Will it be provided in the knitting, or be a 3rd party service that rides "over the top" of a Web TV service. Firstly, the "in the knitting" ploy - news that beeTV has taken $8m funding.From TechCrunch:

Here’s how they pitch it:

“beeTV offers the platform operator’s subscribers their own Personal Content Channel (PCC), which resides in their set top box (whether IPTV, cable, satellite, mobile or DTT), their mobile phones and their PC. This unique Personal Content Channel identifies the subscriber, searches all the content sources, including broadcast TV, subscription TV, VOD, SVOD, PPV, and PVR/Catch-up and pushes the relevant content to that subscriber.”

The company’s recommendation engine comes in three flavors: beeSTBox is its flagship product which was launched at the recent DEMOfall 08 conference in San Diego (see video below). It’s a solution designed for multicast distribution platforms including cable, satellite and IPTV. To manage, control and share your online TV viewing experience, the company created a product called beeWeb, and it’s also bringing the PCC to mobile devices to enable always-on connectivity and the ability to interact with set-top boxes on the go. It currently has an iPhone application in the works that will allow TV viewers to control their STBs, get recommendations for shows & movies that are relevant to them and available in their specific TV subscription, and also enable them to watch trailers and set their STBs to record or create notifications for the shows they would like to watch.

The other option is that the datastreams will be captured in over the top services - we've already noted that Twitter is being used in this way, and here is an interesting addition to this trend fromn Fred Wilson's blog about one of their funded companies' observation:

Simulmedia was founded by Dave Morgan, founder of Real Media and TACODA and a veteran of the online ad targeting business, to deliver similar products and services to the TV market. So he knows a bit about all of this stuff.

The post describes a little experiment Simulmedia did to analyze TV channel surfers using only Twitter posts as their data source. Simulmedia explains why they turned to Twitter data for this work:

To investigate surfing behavior further we tapped into data from Twitter, where dozens of people announce to the world that they are channel surfing every day. Unlike traditional ratings or second-by-second set-top-box information, Twitter has rich qualitative information that reveals motivations behind viewers’ surfing.

I've put the graph up at the top of this post.

The interesting question is which model will win in the endgame.

In essence beeTV stands for the top down definition of what a small group of designers think the user will want, and is embedded into the system - probably walled - and the real customer is the producer.

The Twitter based system is more darwinian in its evolution, floats above any one WebTV system, and will only work if the customer wants to use it so by default will be focussed on the user.

Also, having run a company selling complex systems into the cable and Telco world, I can testify that sales cycles are very long - wheraes an over the top service gets a "free ride" and rapid adoption, albeit with less control. In my view, the former is how things used to be built, the latter is increasingly about how things will be done in future.