This blog is dedicated to chronicling items of interest to customers, partners and friends of Solegy. Through it, we will attempt to articulate why the Solegy Team is excited about our company and the future of our industry, and to highlight items of relevance to the next generation ecoscape that is our business.
If you’re like most of the people I ran this post by before committing it to the Googleverse, you’re probably wondering what The Third Screen means. The rest of this entry will try to answer that question.
As you MUST have heard by now, there’s an arranged marriage afoot between your TV and your PC. Although it promises to be a long engagement, their respective industries are agog with hopeful anticipation. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to thumb through a newspaper or trade journal without stumbling across a story about how this television program or that is being re-packaged for life on the Internet. Speculation abounds.
Not as hyped as the union, but much more interesting in my opinion, is the expected progeny. Yet to be assigned a formal classification, it has already been given a nickname by those in the know – the third screen. Although YOU may not yet have heard of the third screen, I can vouch for its existence with the utmost confidence. My business partner, Stu Sleppin, assures me that the moniker is being bandied about by his rock-and-roll friends in the Hamptons with a fervor not seen since Web 2.0. Not knowing the Hamptons from Fire Island from a fire hydrant, who am I to argue?
Whether the name sticks or not, the image it brings to mind is tangible. I for one can’t wait until there is something that can fill the void between the two screens I now rely on to keep me in touch with the rest of the world. While there are many details that we don’t yet know about the third screen, there are a few things that we can safely surmise: it will be an always-on Internet device; it will be mobile; it will replace a bevy of gadgets that many of us carry around separately today – including, but not limited to, cell phones, iPods, digital cameras and PDAs. And, perhaps most importantly, it will further unleash the creative and dynamic “mash-ups” that are rapidly bringing the Internet to a new level of productivity and usefulness.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that companies even tangentially related to the Internet, television or mobile phone industries view the third screen as the Holy Grail. After all, in a world where all the content there is can be channeled to you through a single mobile portal, every company from Arbitron to Zales must map out a strategy to make the most of the space.
Sure, a lot has to happen before the third screen becomes a reality. To be effective, the intersection of the PC, TV and telephone worlds will require some clever rewiring inside of today’s networks.
That’s where Solegy comes in. The buzz word for what we do is SDP (an acronym for Service Delivery Platform), and we call our managed SDP solution ServicePDQ. It is our vision to facilitate the third screen evolution by providing a software platform that helps service providers to organize, orchestrate and charge for all of the applications, media and content that the third screen will enable.
If that sounds ambitious, it is. Realizing our vision will require a lot of work, and not a little luck. But we believe in the future that the third screen represents and we relish the challenges and opportunities to come.
Along the way, we’ll do out best to keep you up to date from this page in the blogsphere.