Behind the Contours of the Contour

Earlier this week, our colleagues at Cox took the wraps off a beauty of a next-new version of personalized television, branded “Contour.” It’s a continuation of its service extensions earlier this year into screens “beyond the TV,” such as iPads, tablets, laptops, and smartphones.

Until Contour, the app was called “Cox TV Connect,” and offered a hundred or so linear channels. With the additions that shaped it into “Contour,” Cox customers get that plus a whole lot more — and I say that because it really is a whole lot more.

More means tuning into live/linear TV, plus access to free and premium VOD — with recommendations, for those times when nobody can decide. (Surely this happens to you.) Plus anything you’ve “DVR’d.” And, if there are lots of people in your household, your programs stay with you. Recommendations, too, are just for you.

And, if the household contains “legacy” boxes, connected to other TVs in the house? The app can reach them, which is kind of a big deal – bridging that gap between “now” and “next,” and being able to blanket all of the screens in the house with cool services, is a handy competitive differentiator.

Plus it looks super cool, if I may say so myself. Check out Cox’s video demo here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE-8on4PEE8#at=45

All of us here at Cisco are thrilled to be in a position to explain a little bit more about what Contour is all about, under the hood (so to speak.) We’re in that position because the Contour service uses two of our core Videoscape Unity components: Our Videoscape Snowflake navigational environment, and our Videoscape VideoGuard digital rights management (DRM) software.

That means that Videoscape Snowflake is behind the look-and-feel, and Videoscape VideoGuard is what makes it possible to safeguard the rights between Cox and its content providers – on a per show, per channel basis.

Our hats are off to Cox for their achievements with this launch, and we look forward to hearing how well it is received by their subscribers.