Consumer Content - Now Showing

ZoomTown.com Brings Movies-on-Demand to TVs via ADSL

Rob Pickering ZoomTown.com

ZoomTown.com (www.zoomtown.com) is showing a select group of customers in Cincinnati just how good it can get with a DSL connection to the home. Among the offerings the company now has available are video-on-demand, online software delivery and broadcast TV, all provided by a single asymmetric DSL (ADSL) connection to the home.

"In the industry, all people talk about is speed, speed, speed," says Rob Pickering, director of network development for ZoomTown.com, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Broadwing Inc. (www.broadwing.com). "Customers don't understand what they need all that speed for. They need new products and services that they can't get today on narrowband service. Then a lot of people will move to broadband."

ZoomTown.com, which has deployed its services to a base of 35,000 customers, is among the companies that are at the forefront of a revolution bringing video to consumers over the copper wire already coming into their homes.

By 2005, about 7 million homes in North America will be receiving video over DSL, says Michelle Abraham, a senior analyst in the multimedia information service group at Cahners In-Stat Group (www.instat.com). The largest deployment is one done by Qwest Communications International Inc. (www.qwest.com) in Phoenix, where they have 50,000 subscribers. But there are questions about whether or not Qwest will continue with its broadband TV via DSL services, which it started in 1998, noted Abraham.

Where Qwest and ZoomTown.com deployments differ is the flavor of DSL being used. Qwest has selected very high data rate DSL (VDSL), while ZoomTown is relying on ADSL.

Abraham believes that the market in the United States will likely go with VDSL in the future, because the technology is more suited to delivering content to more than two TVs per home. While ADSL can serve two TVs, it is more suited for a video-on-demand application, where only a main TV is used to view the content.

Vendors of the video equipment used by telcos say they see almost an even split between ADSL and VDSL network designs. Dave Caputo, vice president of marketing at PixStream Inc. (www.pixstream.com), which was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com), says about 40 percent of the trials and deployments PixStream sees are VDSL based, another 40 percent use ADL, and the remaining 20 percent rely on some type of Ethernet or fiber-to-the-home connectivity.

ZoomTown.com opted for ADSL when it began offering high-speed Internet access almost three years ago because "it was pretty much the only broadband technology to leverage the existing network base," says Pickering, noting that ADSL is able to provide speeds of up to 128kbps to 7.1mbps and offers his company a lot of flexibility. Today ZoomTown.com's average product offering delivers 1.5mbps downloads.

But ZoomTown.com is much more than just a provider of high-speed Internet access--it's a repository for consumer content that takes advantage of the broadband connection.

For the majority of the last year, ZoomTown.com has been delivering content from Media Station Inc. (www.mediastation.com) and CoolCast.com (www.coolcast.com). Media Station's Select Play offering delivers CD-ROMs--such as video games and educational titles--on demand for a flat subscription price each month. CoolCast.com brings broadcast TV channels and provides innovative packaging of the channel with web content. For instance, Pickering says, CoolCast.com delivers Bloomberg's business news and wraps the Bloomberg website around it, so stock tickers, headlines and other content can be seen simultaneously.

ZoomTown's latest offering comes through its relationship with Intertainer Inc. (www.intertainer.com), which delivers movies, music videos and TV shows on demand. With its new Internet service, ZoomTown.com picks up the interactive TV ball that many telcos dropped several years ago.

"The market for interactive, on-demand services is growing," says Pickering. "Really, four years ago, those talking about interactive TV didn't understand the bandwidth constraints they had at the time. But now those things are possible. We'll soon be able to have a website updating based on the content streaming on the video screen."

In mid-2000, ZoomTown.com completed a 500-user trial in which Intertainer delivered movies-on-demand to the end users' PCs. While the trial proved that "a large number of people will watch a movie on a computer," says Pickering, there was another group who were more interested in getting a movie-on-demand delivered to their TV, so the whole family could gather around and watch.

Those results have led ZoomTown.com and Intertainer into a trial of 2,000 customers who will have movies-on-demand delivered via ADSL direct to their TV. uniView Technologies Corp. (www.uniview.com) will provide the set-top box that will carry the content using Microsoft Corp.'s (www.microsoft.com) Windows Media Technologies including Media Player 7, video format and digital rights management technology.

Unlike cable pay-per-view movies, Intertainer users will be able to have access to the title for 24 hours and use VCR-like features--such as pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding--to control the viewing of the movie, all for approximately the same price as viewing a single cable pay-per-view program.

ZoomTown.com isn't only focused on helping customers access new broadband-enabled products and service. The company also provides technology companies, such as Intertainer, with assistance in testing and market trials of broadband offerings through its Z-START Service Development program.

Z-START, which stands for ZoomTown strategic technology and advanced research testing, gives broadband service providers, software or network providers who are in the early stages of their product development a "living lab" in which they can test their offerings with real customers.

ZoomTown will help Z-START participants with everything from network and systems engineering and web interfaces, to customer care, billing and marketing. Pickering says that a successful trial with ZoomTown can also act as a reference tool for those customers interested in using a specific product or service in their own deployment.

ZoomTown, though, has no aspirations to roll out its offerings in other markets. ZoomTown started as part of local telco Cincinnati Bell Inc., prior to its merger with IXC Communications Inc., to form Broadwing. "Being the incumbent local exchange carrier gave us an advantage. We were focused on that market to deliver consumer services," notes Pickering. Broadwing, however, will continue being a provider of business services nationwide.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines