Liberate Technologies Inc, formerly known as Network Computer Inc (NCI), is evidently tickled to announce that Cable & Wireless Communications Plc has switched on a digital cable TV service based in part on Liberate software. The C&W deal has been cooking for over a year (CI No 3,467). Since it was conceived, NCI has defied its critics by not collapsing altogether, hired Mitch Kertzman away from Sybase, changed its name and enjoyed a very respectable $100m IPO. If further proof of Liberate’s turnaround were needed, founder and former investor Oracle Corp, which cut the original NCI adrift, recently announced that it would have another crack at the same market – and that it would revive the NCI name.
So the C&W agreement comes to fruition at a particularly sweet moment for Liberate. VP of marketing Charlie Tritschler is delighted to report that 46,000 people are already signed up. He explains that C&W wanted to create an environment where they could extract more revenue from each of their subscribers. Liberate’s set top box software uses open internet standards like JavaScript and HTML to create application services that run on top of the platform.
C&W has built what it calls a walled garden environment. Its partners – Barclays’, British Airways and Bloomberg among them – have taken their existing web content and put a new interface on it, one that should seem much more appropriate to a TV viewer. Subscribers can watch enhanced TV programs and engage in transactions with the walled garden partners. Tritschler is particularly proud of a deal with Two Way TV to develop gaming applications to run on the two-way broadband network. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how C&W could extract more revenue from its subscribers than by offering them the heady combination of gambling and TV.
