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Sunday, March 27, 2011

Draft summary for Request for Proposal

OPENIVO - A PC-enhanced environment for a community of television viewers

A managed network for HTPCs providing premium intelligent DVR service, SocialTV, and t-commerce in a system free to the viewer, financed with inserted, skip-able addressable TV commercials.

I have:
A vision
Published patent claims
A broad system design
A commitment to Open Source software
$80,000 in seed capital
$400,000 available for first round funding

I am looking for a partner to help turn the concept into a product, and the product into a community.

Broad system design:

Server (Cloud infrastructure):
1. Network Management (eg. OpenNMS) To include Network Monitoring (fault management), remote configuration , usage monitoring (accounting), performance management and security and privacy management for the client home HTPCs.
2. Interest-based advertising engine - Ad Server (CMS, eg. Drupal). Develop and maintain viewer profiles. Maintain ad database. Serve insertable TV ads based on the viewer profile.
3. Advertising analytics. Gather data on ads watched, ads skipped, ads replayed. Update user profiles. Provide marketing data.
4. TV ad auction module. (eg. phpAuction.org, or contract with Google TV ads). Automated advertising inventory management and timeslot auction.

Client (HTPC)
1. Client DVR/media center. (eg. MythTV/MediaPortal) to include SocialTV (Facebook API), Intelligent recommendation engine with automatic recording, Movie streaming (Amazon Instant), Hulu
2. Addressable ad insertion client module (modified MythCommFlag, video file editor)
3. T-commerce (amazon)

IP: Home computers subsidized with targeted television advertising.
COMPUTER-COST SUBSIDIZING METHOD United States Patent Application 20100058378
See it at: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2010/0058378.html

Because the system will be based on open source with a plug-in architecture, I don't think it is necessary to design big. An alpha system would include minimally marketable features of PVR functionality with an excellent UI, and remote network management for installation, configuration, maintenance, and monitoring.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Marc.
I followed the link from the LinHES forum. I was wondering about how you are going to insert ads? What problems do you foresee from the content creators and distributors when their ads are replaced?

Marc Allan Feldman said...

A variation on the mythcommflag algorithm can identify commercial breaks. The ads are edited in, as inserted file data. Openivo does not delete ads, but it gives the viewer the power to skip them.