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Tech Check
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zilliontv.tv |
In the increasingly crowded landscape of set-top boxes and on-demand, movie download services, Zillion hopes it will stand out because of its service, its business model, and a top shelf group of investors and content providers.
The company officially came out of stealth mode today. I spent some time with the Zillion folks yesterday, getting a primer on the technology, and seeing the fruits of years of labor from a team steeped in cable, satellite, entertainment and graphics history. The result is a compelling platform that will turn any digital TV into the ultimate on-demand, interactive entertainment system, and while the behind-the-scenes technology that makes all this possible is amazingly complicated, it is completely transparent to the user because of a simple, Wii-like remote control with only four buttons and complete and total control of the experience.
So what is Zillion?
A sleek box that fits atop any flat-panel TV that includes an ethernet or wireless high-speed connection to the net. With the service, which carries no subscription fees and the box itself will cost under $50, customers can access all kinds of movies and TV shows from Zillion's content partners who also double as investors: Fox, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, our parent NBC/Universal, Disney. Forty more studio agreements are on the way. Movies can be ordered by title or genre and can easily be found through on-screen menus. The boxes won't be available at retail, but instead distributed by Zillion's internet service provider partners, to be named shortly.
Consumers have the choice to watch content for free as long as they view a few commercials before the movie or TV show begin (and those commercials are actually custom-tailored to each user based on his or her own preferences in products and companies); they can "rent" the content for a fee, which varies from program to program; or they can "buy" the content and watch it any time they want. Everything lives in the cloud. Nothing is actually downloaded to your TV box. Customers aren't navigating their way through complicated websites. It's a point-and-click kinda thing where user-friendliness actually lives up to the billing.
"This is all about TV. This is not about bringing the internet into the television, this is more about providing a more entertaining television experience," says chief engineer Mike Catalano. "We believe there is a fundamental difference between the 'hunt and seek' mode that people go to the internet in, and the passive/watching mode they're in when they're watching television."
Bravo, brother!
There's another key part of Zillion's model, courtesy of another key partner: The credit card company Visa. Customers will be able to watch commercials, and using their remote, click on things they see on screen and buy them instantly, right from the TV, using the nifty "Buy Now" button right on the remote itself. Love Sheldon's shirts on "The Big Bang Theory?" I do. With this model, from on the screen to on your back with a single click of the remote, as close to the Holy Grail for TV advertisers as you can imagine. Content providers and Visa will share in the revenue that the service and those ads actually generate. It's a kind of "back to the future" approach to television, blending the ad-supported history of the medium and the on-demand revolution that's gripping the industry.
But the service is not without its challenges. The field is already very crowded with other services that do some of these same things, including devices from Apple, Sony, Roku, and services from Netflix, Hulu (a partnership including our parent NBC) and so many others. Not to mention the difficulty in securing rights to all this content.
"If you could imagine the daunting task of trying to secure all the content that's ever been made in the world, that's what we're attempting to do. We're literally building the largest content ingest system, for television, as far as we know, that has ever been built," Mitch Berman, Zillion's CEO, tells me. He also says Zillion will be a $1 billion business in 3 years. That's a bold statement, especially in the current climate.
We played with the service yesterday. Easy, easy. And the streaming video we watched was crystal clear. Even cameraman Mark was impressed when Mitch said we were watching standard def images. They looked pretty HD to me. The boxes will be available in a few months. This will be a fun one to watch.
Correction: Due to a copy editing error, an earlier post had the incorrect logo for ZillionTV.
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