We met with You.i TV, an Ottowa-based Canadian small company (200 staff) that is looking to develop apps for TV as the company believes that Apps are the future of TV. The company, which has a lot of experience with gaming, before it got into TV, realised that developing apps for TV can be tricky, but the apps often didn’t exploit the very high quality GPUs that are available in modern TV SoCs.
Furthermore, there are lots of different hardware platforms if you try to make your apps work on different platforms, so it has developed an App platform that allows multi-screen video apps to be developed in the same way that game engines work, with high performance and running with a single code base in different architectures. The platform exploits existing tools such as Photoshop and After Effects, tools that are well developed and understood.
Once the logic of an app has been developed, it is said to be simple to develop another app that has a completely different look, but with the same core underlying functions, making it ideal for those that have to support a wide variety of different markets.
Early wins for the company include Touchdown! CFL Mobile for the Canadian Football League. Treehouse is an app for young viewers and the company told us that it created the same functions under three different brands and on four platforms in just six weeks. The company is also working with Shomi, described as the “Canadian Netflix” and Sony Crackle.
Analyst Comment
Sometimes you meet companies that are very clever or…. In our quick intro, I can’t say that I was completely convinced. I am grateful to the company’s dogged PR person, Paul Schneider, for example, for hounding the firm after the interview to get an answer to the question “so what GPUs do you support?” which seemed to cause some confusion. Eventually, the answer came back “All of them”. After the show, a release was issued that showed a $12 million funding round for the firm with Time Warner as the lead investor. That does tend to suggest some endorsement of the approach, although I have known big companies make bad technology choices before! (BR)
