Interview : Jonathan Dakss, Director of Interactive TV Product Development, NBC Universal

You also recently entered a deal with Visiware, under which Visiware will develop a catalog of interactive TV games based on Universal properties, and offer them on its Playin'TV games channel. Could you tell us a little about that?

NBC Universal revealed earlier this week that the single-screen interactive TV application it is offering on Time Warner Cable systems in association with the new Bravo channel reality TV show, "Top Chef," is now garnering average viewer response rates as high as 26%--up 300% from the show's March premiere.(Note: the application, which was built by and is based on technology from interactive TV technology and services provider, Navic Networks, allows viewers to use their remotes to respond to a series of topical questions. The polls appear as pop-up screens, timed to occur at precise moments throughout the hour-long show. Navic's technology records and compiles the responses and displays the results to viewers in real time in each local market.) The show's finale later this month will live feature voting across three platforms: set-top boxes, mobiles, and the Web.

Jonathan Dakss, NBC Universal's director of interactive TV product development, recently spoke to [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow about the "Top Chef" application and NBC Universal's other recent and ongoing interactive TV projects, about its recently announced Technology Growth Center and its TV360 initiative, about its games partnership with Visiware, about its future interactive and multiplatform TV plans, and more.

[itvt]: What are your responsibilities at NBC?

Dakss: What I do tends to fall into two categories: the first part of what I do is work across all the NBC Universal businesses to educate them about what interactive TV can do and how it works, and also work directly with those businesses to launch interactive TV projects. The second part of what I do is lead development of in-house ITV technologies that we can leverage, in order to make it easier for producers, networks and the like to roll out interactive TV, and in order to reduce the cost of launching ITV projects.

[itvt]: You also recently entered a deal with Visiware, under which Visiware will develop a catalog of interactive TV games based on Universal properties, and offer them on its Playin'TV games channel. Could you tell us a little about that?

Dakss: Yes. We've developed two games with them so far, based on the movie, "King Kong." There's a Kong quiz game, which, was the first game we developed with them and which has launched on Bell ExpressVu and DirecTV Latin America; and there's a Kong adventure game, which is even better than the first. It's an arcade-style game that's patterned after the movie. That is going to launch on DISH, Bell ExpressVu, DirecTV Latin America, and all the other platforms where Playin'TV is currently distributed.

We obviously do a lot of merchandising on games platforms, but the Kong quiz game was the only place that you could go and see all of the photos and production stills and artwork from the movie in one place. The game lets you access something like 300 stills and pieces of artwork. I think for fans, it is a great experience.

Now with the adventure game, you actually get to play as the different characters in the movie. So one minute, you're Kong; the next minute, you're Jack. As you succeed through each level, you get to see a still from the movie. So, basically, you get taken forward in the plot, as it were. So it's as if you're playing through the movie--culminating, of course, with the final scene with Kong in New York.

[itvt]: How did the partnership with Visiware come about?

Dakss: That was something that I worked on with a fellow named Bill Kispert. Bill oversees all of gaming for the company. He had actually done some experimentation in the past with one-screen interactive TV games: basically, he had been approached by BSkyB, which wanted to license "The Hulk" to make it into a game on the Sky platform. It did fairly well, but Bill had been mostly focused on the more popular, more traditional gaming platforms, such as consoles and PC's and--more recently--mobiles.

Once I joined the company, I got together with Bill, and we took a look at what was going on in the interactive TV games industry. As I'm sure you know, it's really growing quite rapidly, and it's become probably one of the top moneymakers in the interactive TV space. At the same time, I would say that, in general, NBC Universal as a company is very seriously interested in casual gaming. Simply because casual gaming really does speak to the same viewing audience that we have for our programming. Casual gaming, too, is quite a big industry--bigger than you'd probably think.

So, with these things in mind, Bill and I basically canvassed the interactive TV games landscape for who we thought would be the best partner--both in terms of distribution reach on an international scale, and in terms of quality and of appreciation for the kind of brands that we represent. You see, if you look at the Universal catalog, it has a lot of properties that would really lend themselves to being made into games: "Jurassic Park," "The Mummy," "The Fast and the Furious," to name but a few. Anyhow, we really clicked with Visiware, and I'd say that, so far, the relationship has been really great.

Visiware really understands what it means to be an international channel. If you think about it, they're in so many countries, and they have so many things to take into consideration--different languages, different set-top box hardware and middleware platforms, and so on. In order to be able to run a profitable enterprise the way they do, they have to be able to streamline their operations, but still provide a quality product. So that was one of the things that we liked about them.

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URL: www.nbcuni.com