• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, February 22, 2012

Canoe Ventures, the partnership of major cable companies formed a few years back to make scaled addressable and interactive TV a reality is dramatically scaling back its operation.

Sources said that Canoe employees were informed of the decision at a meeting at its New York headquarters just hours ago.

The cable companies that are part of the venture, including Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House, formed Canoe with great fanfare in 2008 to create platforms for national addressable and interactive television distribution. 

Canoe had hoped to address a major obstacle to national and scaled addressability and interactive TV systems--the technology deployed by the big cable companies to run their operations were closed systems not compatible with each other. Now it appears the venture will focus just on VOD.

A while back, Canoe pared back its ambitions a bit, abandoning addressable projects to focus on interactive efforts. But those too were hampered by delays.