Gudjon’s Blog

According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is defined as “a trend in World Wide Web technology, and web design, a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.^[2][3] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.”

With the introduction of Zignal Cloud as fully W3C standard compliant and now being architected as hosted services, fully extendible with rich API, we are seeing the birth of what we can call a TV 2.0 service.

You sign up for the service just like when you create your Salesforce.com, Facebook, Google Apps or Flickr account. If you have technical resources at hand, you can further extend it and integrate with your own software, equally on the client- and server-side.

Zignal Cloud comes with a library of extensions, like an Electronic Programming Guide Extension, Video on Demand Extension, Personal Video Recorder Extension and more. As we do not want to limit our platform with just our own creativity, we empower the development community to participate and contribute to our development. The primary purpose of the Zignal Extensions is to offer a rich user-interface feature for the end-user.

Additionally, the platform offers a server side API for integration of existing solutions, like provisioning, asset scheduling or billing. The Zignal Cloud API functions do include Provisioning API, Billing API , Schedule Manager API , Session Manager API , Asset Manager API and Reminder API, to name a few.

The interesting part is that you can sign-up and use the platform fully free of charge. Its not until your deployment has volume that subscription payments kick in. This means that entrepreneurs, innovators and developers can start using the platform to develop their own offerings and solutions at no licensing cost for Zignal.

To demonstrate the flexibility and integration power of Zignal, you can see examples of the extensions that do come with platform:

Zignal Video on Demand Extension

Today its not only about the Hollywood blockbuster catalogue of on demand videos, but also community- and user generated content. This means we will see more customizable Video Catalogue Extensions that will even integrate with services like YouTube, MySpace Videos or the locally hosted video library of downloaded DivX, AVI, MP4 and Quicktime movies.

Advanced Trick Player Extension

We have seen a very encouraging development in technologies that offer video on demand. To be able to fully support the latest features and technologies, our Trick Player Extension can be further enhanced to utilize the capabilities of the deployed on demand technologies.

Personal Video Recording Extension

We can foresee various scenarios of utilization of personal video recordings. In some cases service providers would like to deploy networked-PVR services and in other scenarios the existing PC at home would be utilized to be the actual hard-drive recording device. By customizing the PVR Extension, alternative business models can be implemented and offered to the subscriber base.

Photo Album Extension

You would perhaps like to implement a photo album that integrates with your own photo service or public services like Flickr or Picasa.

Electronic Programming Guide Extension

We will surely see a strong development of new technologies and features integrated right within the EPG, to support more advanced interactivity and advertisements. The Zignal EPG Extension can be further extended and enhanced by developers to create additional functionality to suite the different business model needs.

This was my quick overview of why I feel that our next generation Zignal platform can truly become the foundation for the new TV 2.0. At this writing, our Zignal Cloud is in an invitation only beta program. Nevertheless, you can sign up for the program and get evaluated for early bird participation.

Send me your thoughts on email, join me at Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook or just comment on this blog. I look forward for hearing from you.