I got a brief view of all the capabilities of Active Video and was impressed. Sure my company, VoyageTV has an Active Video channel on Cablevision (channel 608), but I had never met Active’s CEO Jeff Miller nor had I seen what the capabilities could be.
And I have Boxee running on my laptop and have distribution deals with several over-the-top solutions, but Active Video has a couple big advantages that could help them win. While Active Video can run off a cable box, it doesn’t really need to. It can run with a Web connection. And it doesn’t require “box” which is a mistake that Boxee is making (in my opinion). I doubt I would buy a box — even an Apple TV box. Why would you? The TV is itself a box. Connected to the Internet it just needs to “tune” to an IP address that can deliver a user experience given the aspect ratio and size of most sets.
And Active Video delivers on the Interface. Big Plus. Finally, partnering with the cable companies seems like perhaps anchoring to a sinking ship, but I wouldn’t bet against cable just yet. There is simply too much ad money there and people watch a lot of TV and will be doing so for quite some time. So trying to capitalize a start-up waiting for the cable companies to run out of steam seems like a painful ordeal. Better join ’em. For now. Like Active Video.