Hybrid TV looks beyond the TiVo to VoD and interactive services

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 09 March 2010 18:07

Your IT - Entertainment

Hybrid Television Services, the Seven subsidiary that distributes the TiVo in Australia, is gearing up to provide video on demand and interactive services.

The company has announced a restructure that it says is designed to support this expansion of its business. It has created a new position, that of chief sales officer, which has been filled by Peter Sharp, formerly a business development manager with Derni Retail, and promoted a number of general managers.

In addition to maintaining and growing the TiVo business, Sharp will be responsible for developing additional opportunities to exploit the CASPA platform across widget/Internet-enabled televisions, (Multi-media Interface Devices), games consoles and the like. It was launched last November and its Hybrid TV's chief means of getting into the VoD market.

CASPA is a Hybrid TV service that delivers movies and other video content to TiVo devices over a broadband Internet connection.

At launch CASPA content was offered download quota free by four ISPs: Internode, iiNet, iPrimus and Adam Internet. These have since been joined by Apex Internet.

Hybrid TV's CEO Robbee Minicola explained Hybrid TV's plans for CASPA to iTWire's ExchangeDaily newsletter at the launch last November. She said that the company's ambition was for much of the content on CASPA to be advertising funded and for the service to be available direct to TVs without the need for a TiVo, and that widgets would be the key to this strategy.


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