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By Jonathan Tombes, Senior Editor

It takes testing, teamwork and time to get interactive TV (ITV) applications right, say the principals involved in the initial phase of Videotron's deployment of PowerTV's software.

Since re-booting the TV set is a non-starter, operators aim to get these apps right the first time. "You don't get many chances to fall on your face with a subscriber," Dr. Ken Morse, PowerTV's chief technical officer, says.

As a result, Morse says PowerTV diverges from the personal computer (PC) mentality when it comes to testing its products, running a one-to-two or even one-to-one ratio of software quality assurance (SQA) tester to developer(s).

"We're putting a lot of investment into SQA," Morse says.

A lot of that testing involves the ability to diagnose real-time problems, such why an e-mail may not be coming through. "There could be 1,001 reasons for that," Morse says. "What you want to do is get very quickly to the one reason."

The idea is to do it both quickly and transparently. "That's the ultimate goal: the subscriber never sees an impact," Morse says.

Pre-qualifying products is necessary. Apart from its SQA testers, Morse says PowerTV has five end-to-end cable systems in its facility and an even more extensive verification test lab on the campus of its parent, Scientific-Atlanta.

But deploying even a single app also entails major integration on the operator side. In this case, Videotron wanted to leverage common e-mail accounts and its cable modem service, Morse says.

One key to integrating was being able to see the software early, Guy Charbonneau, Videotron's director of interactive television, says.

Pre-alpha, please

Charbonneau says Videotron may be "a little atypical," given its status as an ITV pioneer. Twelve years ago, Videotron launched Videoway, its own interactive service.

"We know what it is to integrate, to manage services, hardware and OS (operating system) software," Charbonneau says. "That's why we were able to say, 'Hey, give us a pre-alpha version.'"

Given PowerTV's intention to begin offering a bundle of ITV apps (surf, e-mail and chat) in the third quarter of this year, deployments are likely to become more turnkey-oriented than has been the case with Videotron.

In any case, getting ITV up and running takes time. Even with Videotron' s experience, it was a year after announcing that it would deploy several of PowerTV's services to its 300,000-plus Videoway subscriber base that the Canadian operator launched the first app, SofaMAIL.

Videotron may have gotten an early look at the software, but Morse emphasizes that any change takes time to verify. "It's never less than six months, even if it's one line of code."

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