Cable Industry Launches SelecTV™ Brand to Promote Viewer Adoption Of ITV

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Canoe Ventures™ Leads Industry Team Effort to Drive Consumer Awareness of Interactive Television

NEW YORK — The cable industry has announced the launch of “SelecTV™,” a consumer-facing brand that will appear on-screen to indicate the availability of interactive television content. For viewers, SelecTV signifies an interactive experience that provides them more opportunity to engage with their favorite content. The SelecTV brand promises a seamless and secure interaction between the viewer, the cable company and the programmer, advertiser or content sponsor across all major U.S. cable systems.

SelecTV is the result of an industry-wide brand initiative led by Canoe Ventures, an advanced digital television platform and services company, in concert with the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB), the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs®), and the nation’s leading MSOs, including Bright House Networks, Cablevision Systems Corporation, Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation, Cox Communications, Inc., and Time Warner Cable, as well as national advertising and cable television programming partners.

“Working together, cable is introducing innovative ITV applications across the country with unprecedented scale this year. Canoe spearheading SelecTV on behalf of the industry has resulted in cable taking an important step towards delivering national ITV capabilities with one common face for the viewer,” said Steve Burke, COO, Comcast. “Our industry’s growing ITV capabilities enable content providers to engage with consumers in ways that are meaningful to them. With SelecTV, we are introducing a brand that reflects the value of what we deliver.”

“Canoe’s mission is to advance the digital TV business,” said Vicki Lins, CMO, Canoe Ventures. “Just as we’re driving standardization of technologies to help scale a truly national ITV platform, we’re leading the effort to promote wider adoption of our applications on top of this platform by ensuring a flexible yet consistent, quality user experience represented by the SelecTV brand.”

“The process behind the development of the SelecTV brand is an example of how the cable industry collaborates to provide the best customer entertainment experience,” said Char Beales, President and CEO, CTAM. “From its conception in CTAM’s Advanced Cable Solutions Consortium, through our Branding Committee’s involvement in the name and identity, members contributed to this industry effort. Together we learned from Cablevision’s successful launch of their Optimum Select™ brand which informed our choice of the simple and intuitive SelecTV.”

“We hope that SelecTV will come to signal for viewers the value of interactive television content, and therefore, encourage more viewer participation with ITV. Being brand stewards themselves, advertisers and agencies are gratified by the news that, with the introduction of SelecTV, there will be one uniform branded identity that will signal interactivity and draw attention to advanced advertising applications on TV. Simplicity, consistency and ease-of-use are the ‘must’ attributes we hear most often from advertisers about what should induce a healthy volume of trial on the next TV ad platform,” said Sean Cunningham, CEO and President, CAB.

“Interactive television is a valuable marketing medium,” said Bob Liodice, CEO and President, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). “TV has always been a great branding vehicle, and now ITV provides measurable engagement for marketers. Introducing SelecTV can add even more value for them by encouraging viewer participation with their brands.”

“The promise of ITV has been around for almost 20 years. We finally have the opportunity to engage consumers with brands and content in ways that are meaningful to both the advertiser AND the consumer. We applaud the cable industry for working together to develop SelecTV, a unified identity for simple interactivity, that will aid consumer awareness and add advertiser value,” said Nancy Hill President and CEO the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).

“CableLabs has been working to extend EBIF™ as a common technology platform to support interactive television across the cable industry,” said Paul Liao, President and CEO, CableLabs, “and the SelecTV brand provides a simple way for consumers to recognize the interactive cable services enabled by that platform.”

“We applaud the progress made so far by industry stakeholders to enable the launch of the SelecTV brand and look forward to this effort producing innovative tools for consumers,” said Kyle McSlarrow, President and CEO, National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

Canoe Ventures is working with cable companies, programmers and industry organizations on implementation guidelines, processes and solutions to establish ubiquity and standardization, while at the same time maintaining flexibility for how viewers experience ITV. SelecTV is a key first step to establishing a common identity for alerting consumers of the presence of ITV.

The SelecTV brand will be managed by Canoe Ventures and licensed for use by certified cable television providers, their programming partners and advertisers.