• by March 30, 2004

HANGING OUT WITH THE VOD SQUAD - It was one of those early spring days in the Big Apple when there's no place better to roam than in Manhattan's Central Park. German-accented tourists were strolling, crocuses were blooming and rodents were scrimmaging for indeterminate bits of left-over winter refuse. But the Riff wasn't meandering on the Great South Lawn, or loitering by the Wolman Rink. We were hanging out in the parking lot behind Tavern On The Green, where James Kelso had his 17-foot tractor-trailer parked. Normally, the Riff doesn't dig big rigs, but we'd never been on a "Vod Rod" before, so we couldn't resist the opportunity to see this mechanized marvel, a traveling road show of next generation video-on-demand (VOD) TV engineering that's packed into an 18-wheeler. If we've finally approached the on ramp, as Kelso suggests, to the nation's super highway, this is the baby built to ride it.

"We like to call her Kasey," says Kelso, glancing admiringly at the rig's sleek 80-foot long lines, which house the mobile equivalent of a multichannel cable TV head-end. When he's not patching cable's on the racks of computer servers or digital TV receivers that line Kasey's walls, or poking around under her hood, Kelso serves as vice president and general manager of broadband systems for SeaChange, a technology company that is trying to do for television, what Sun Microsystems did for the Web. And Kasey is paving the way, criss-crossing America as it travels from trade show to trade show and making personal appearances for any MSO who'll have her.

Built for less than $1 million, Kasey has an annual budget of about $600,000, which Kelso says has already paid for itself in savings from the shipping and labor fees SeaChange would have had to shell out to send all the gear and set-up exhibit booths at all the trade shows Kasey covers. Most of that goes to the husband-and-wife driver team that navigate her from place to place, and to the engineering team that must be on location to set her up and break her down, all of which can be done in the matter of hours, though Kelso was still debugging systems while giving the Riff a run through on Monday.

As marvelous as Kasey is - and you truly have to see her to believe her - it is the next generation of TV technology built into her nooks and crannies that really needs to be witnessed by anyone considering themselves to be up on VOD, or what Kelso pronounces as V-ahd! "Actually, the people who are really in the know call it on-demand," corrected Kelso when the Riff asked how industry insiders refer to video-on-demand.

Whatever you call it, or however you pronounce it, SeaChange seems to have figured out how to make this stuff work and - quite possibly - how to make advertising work as a part of it. As reported in today's MediaDailyNews, SeaChange is poised to announce a suite of new VOD features that will give operators and advertisers much more control over serving ads that are relevant to consumers, and therefore are presumably less likely to get zapped. As for those who would zap them, SeaChange has got that figured out too, including a feature that superimposes a real-time six-second TV commercial during the six seconds it takes for a viewer to fast-forward through a typical 30-second spot.

While it is still unclear if and when SeaChange will deploy such features, one thing it is already rolling out is a new VOD format dubbed (as if we needed more acronymic letters in today's column) DVD VOD, which renders a VOD as the spitting image of a standard theatrical DVD release, replete with "extras" viewing options. The reason, says Kelso, wasn't simply mimicry, but the fact that using that format makes virtually anything produced as a DVD - including your son's or daughter's little league game - adaptable to a VOD window.

But the development that really piqued the Riff's interest was the one that Kelso would discuss in only the most shadowy of terms. "We're doing something with ShadowTV," alludes Kelso, referring to a company that scans, records and archives U.S. TV transmissions for retrieval via a broadband Internet server. ShadowTV currently makes broadcasts of NBC and CNBC news programs available to users over the Web. Kelso says one application might be if a company wanted to use ShadowTV to search for news broadcasts that mention its company or its company's executives, which would then be delivered on-demand via SeaChange's TV technology. Sound a little like Google for TV? It does to us.