What's On? Digital Home Entertainment Devices

IBDNetwork held an event on May 25, 2004 on Digital Home Entertainment Devices (& services).  Four young companies were given the chance to give a short presentation to the audience and to four venture capital experts.  After the presentations the VCs and audience were allowed to ask questions.  Finally, people voted for the company that they felt had the best chance to succeed.

These are some brief notes from the event.  Take a look at the notes and the company websites, and you can vote for which one to vote for yourself - then compare your vote with that of the VCs and the audience.

MODERATOR:

Chris Shipley, Executive Director, DEMO Conference

PRESENTERS: (and notes from their talk)

  • Brad Kayton, President, Marketing & Business Development, PRISMIQ
    • Makes a "Digital Media Adaptor" for showing photos, videos & music that are stored in your PC on your TV for $199.  Has been available for about a year.
    • Expanding product to include other broadband services, such as support for IPTV, VOD and "Diskless" DVR and "HiDef" (uses the PC's disk)
    • Expanding markets into Education, Hospitality, and Custom Installation with variations of the basic product
    • Can scale to about 10K units/month with a planned GM of 30-35%, and 12% Operating Margin.  Aiming for $100M in 2007.
    • Intending to stay with the hardware business.
    • Claims that there are no serious competitors because others do not have the combination of features they do.
    • Customers generally find one feature they like and see all the other features as a nice bonus.
  • Amy Love, COO, Molino Networks
    • Offers software for digital home entertainment devices for the transfer of DVDs, CD, photos and videos to a HDD. Does not rely on a PC being part of the network.
    • In addition to the unique UI, the software handles the storage, manipulation and playback of content.  Content is stored in native formats (no additional compression) for faster response times.
    • HW platform agnostic - can work on a number of device types.
    • DRM is a key issue, and they claim to have addressed this issue.
    • No required service fee, but they have a way to get recurring revenue from attached services.
  • Steve Shannon, Founder and EVO, Sales & Marketing, Akimbo, Inc.
    • Offers a service that aggregates content from many Internet-based content sources (e.g. CinemaNOW & iFilms) into a "channel" that allows you to watch the content on your TV, much like another TV channel.  They create a program guide to help the user sort through the content.  Not yet launched.
    • They have about 40 content source providers.  "Channels" can be arranged a la carte or be packaged.
    • They handle all the billing, so the customer only pays one service fee no matter where the content came from.  Base fee is $10/month, plus they get a 35% revenue share from the other content owners, 40% from some premium PPV content, and revenue from their reference HW platform (a sort of STB).
    • Not yet offering regular studio content, but plan to do so.  The value proposition to the studios is that they will have a low cost channel with library flexibility, so they can monetize their archive.
    • NetFlix (which is about to launch their movies via TiVo later this year) is seen as another possible channel - not a competitor.
  • Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku
    • Offers a stylish "Digital Media Adaptor" for showing high definition photos & art on the TV, and also a "music bridge" for sending music over the network from the PC to other rooms.  $299, and available now.
    • Open-source, with free downloadable SDK so people can use the platform to develop other applications and content.
    • Already offered through a number of big-box and equivalent channels.
    • Will soon offer iTunes support.
    • Goal of $10-30M revenue this year.  Claims the sky is the limit and wants to be another Sony or Apple.
    • Staffed by many people from ReplayTV

JUDGES:

Now you be the judge - select the company you think is most likely to succeed and click on "Submit" to see how the VC's and Audience voted - plus see some of the comments from the VCs.

  Prismiq
  Molino Networks
  Akimbo
  Roku

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