OpenTV is a company that sells to other companies like Foxtel in Australia, British Sky Broadcasting in England, and the Dish Network in the States. They create middleware products for cable and satellite companies to use and provide to their customers. It’s the same kind of thing Scientific Atlanta does for my cable provider, Rogers.

Thomas Hawk and Davis Freeberg recently got a chance to interview Marc McCarthy, Vice President of Corporate Communications and Wesley Hoffman the General Manger of the North American Cable Division at OpenTV.

OpenTV’s 2.0 PVR supports HDTV, live stats, interactive weather reports (does this mean I can change the weather here?), karaoke, and interactive gaming. That’s the cool stuff. The scary stuff is that they can take your profile and use it to replace commercials with more highly targetted versions. For me that would mean lots of Coke, Star Wars, F1, gaming, and car commerials. All the more reason for my wife to ask me to please fast forward them!

OpenTV
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection - OpenTV: TiVo, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore