Pure Integration, LLC

The Challenge

Canoe Ventures (CVL) is a joint venture between the nations’s six largest Multiple System Operators (MSO). Their mission is to aggregate the collective capabilities of their digital infrastructure and collaborate with industry leaders in technology, research, programming and more to re-energize TV. This involves significant coordination between CVL and each MSO. Many engineering activities and tasks are required including: clearing forward/return-path signaling on a headend-by-headend basis; understanding key MSO-specific dependencies; and executing Field Technical Integration (FTI) and Operational Readiness Testing (ORT) in each of the MSO markets as new locations and programmers are on-boarded. All of this must be accomplished while meeting CVL launch targets.

Upon completion, advertisers would have the ability to launch a single interactive campaign across a national footprint with tens of millions of households, something previously unavailable to advertisers.

The Solution

Because of its deep MSO business and technical expertise and five years of Enhanced/Interactive TV and Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) experience, pureIntegration was brought into the Canoe Ventures organization to do the following:

• Deployment Engineering Program Management – pureIntegration worked as part of the CVL Deployment Engineering team to synthesize each MSO’s launch schedule into a cohesive master CVL launch plan, which contained a weighted launch footprint prediction tool used by CVL C-level management for reporting.
• Operational Readiness Testing (ORT) – our teams planned, streamlined and executed ORT between CVL and each MSO market. We also worked with CVL and their MSO partners to create a database that tracked each data point as it crossed the end-to-end CVL system (including each CVL ecosystem partner).
  Service Assurance Requirements – our teams worked directly with CVL resources to create CVL’s first draft of Service Assurance requirements. We iterated with CVL’s Product and Engineering groups to ensure the appropriate requirements would be met for CVL Launch, the appropriate roadmap was in place, and all required partners were moving toward completion for the post-launch period.

The Business Benefits

CVL Management was provided with a robust footprint model that could be updated with each MSO’s individual tracking systems and data points. Not only was the model scalable for future CVL partners, it also accounted for a wide variety of assumptions that could be easily adjusted with real-time results. In addition, it showed (a) how varying assumptions would modify CVL’s ultimate footprint over time and (b) the ability to view a CVL-weighted footprint. This view took into account a number of variables to give CVL Management a “level of confidence” in each MSO market and its expected launch date, at both market and aggregate levels.

Furthermore, CVL Management was highly appreciative of the deep ORT data point tracking, which gave executives of all levels, including those of their MSO partners, confidence that data was flowing as expected during ORT in an end-to-end capacity and clearly articulated any launch risk.