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eetimes.com
Metabyte spins-off personalized TV operations
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(02/09/00, 5:15 p.m. EST)
SAN MATEO, Calif. — Metabyte Inc. has spun off its TV-personalization operation into a new company, with support from a pair of heavyweight backers. Thomson Multimedia and Seagate Technology Inc. are minority investors in Metabyte Networks Inc., which plans to license its personal digital recording technologies, called MbTV, and to run its own services.
Paris-based Thomson, which led the investment, and disk-drive powerhouse Seagate (Scotts Valley, Calif.) together hold 15 percent of Metabyte Networks. Both companies declined to disclose financial terms. So far, Thomson and Seagate are the only two publicly announced licensees of the MbTV technologies.
Metabyte Networks is hardly alone in vying for a share of the emerging personal video-recording market. But Manu Mehta, president and chief executive officer, said his company offers a set of technologies very different from those already provided by such pioneers as TiVo and Replay Networks.
MbTV software, which the company calls a "preference determination engine," "learns" clusters of TV-watching behavior within a household, filtering TV programs and storing only the ones that a particular viewer is most likely to be interested in. "The focus of our technology development has never been on 'when' [to record or play back TV programs], but rather on 'what' [to choose and store]," said Mehta.
Metabyte Networks boasts several patent-pending technologies based on advanced statistics, fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence, including proprietary methods of personalizing TV programs on a client level, building TV viewer profiles automatically and filtering programming for each TV viewer.
In addition, the company's storage management engine is capable of determining which program to erase and when to erase it when space is limited on a local storage device.
The process of TV personalization — ranging from building personal profiles to filtering TV programs — is done entirely on the client side, not on a server, said Mehta. This has important implications, he said.
"The system requires no back channel, and the profile never has to leave the house." As a result, "This will fit in a one-way broadcast stream with no problems," Mehta said.
Classic couch potato
The target audience is the classic couch potato, not the tech hobbyist. The goal, said Mehta, is to provide "interactive TV in as passive a fashion as possible."
Metabyte Networks will license its core software technologies to both consumer electronics OEMs and network service providers, as well as entering the service business itself. Mehta, however, added that "OEMs can take advantage of our technologies without depending on new services or changes in network service providers' infrastructure," because the MbTV technology is designed to work on the client side.
When and how licensees will start incorporating MbTV technologies into their products remains unclear. A Thomson Multimedia spokesman said, "We have no product applications yet," other than the "potential for personalizing TV."
Mehta, however, predicted that OEMs will be rolling out boxes equipped with MbTV technologies later this year. Metabyte Networks plans to enter the service business "early next year," he said.
Metabyte said it will beta test all of its key software technologies in the coming few weeks. MbTV software already runs on top of Microsoft Corp.'s TV Platform and Windows CE. The company plans to "support, in the coming few weeks and months, other leading operating systems and middleware for interactive TV," Mehta added.
Besides the investments from Thomson and Seagate, Metabyte Networks was internally funded by Metabyte Inc., a privately held company founded by Mehta in 1993. Metabyte has expanded its business through developing and licensing intellectual property, along with consulting in network technologies, operating systems for set-top boxes as well as video and graphics.
Initially a team of 17 people, mostly engineers, is being transferred from Metabyte to Metabyte Networks. By setting up the TV operation as an independent company, "We have a clear objective to do an initial public offering sometime," Mehta said, although "we don't know when." |
