Tuesday, March 6 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM Session E: ITV Portals - Entry Point to Content, E-Commerce and the Television Interface Now that the reality of ITV and ETV is upon us, the TV experience is about to enter a new world of portals and the elbowing for onscreen viewing space, not unlike portal competition on the PC. The relationship between the TV viewer, the remote handheld device and the TV interface will be going through significant changes in the next few years. He who controls the gateway will have massive influence over the entire viewing experience, effecting advertising, commerce as well as the ability of the viewer to receive programming. The ITV/ETV portal will not be a simple product, but will more likely emerge from the relationships between the TV programmers, advertisers and technology manufacturers. Terrence Coles, Senior Vice President, Content, Intertainer Kent A. Libbey, Director, Advanced Television Products, Excite@Home Ranjit Sahota, CEO, MetaTV David Witus, Director of Content Programs, Microsoft TV Platforms Group Kris Narayan, Chairman & founder, Transcast Steve Shanon, Vice President Marketing, Replay TV Bill Sanders, Executive Vice President, Big Ticket Television, a Paramount/Viacom company, Moderator Terrence Coles, Senior Vice President, Content, Intertainer: As Intertainer’s Senior Vice President, Content, Terrence Coles oversees content acquisition, e-commerce, advertising and enhanced television programming for the broadband entertainment on demand service. Prior to joining Intertainer, he served as the Southwest account manager for Lycos and as an advertising and sales executive for AOL’s Digital City, Los Angeles. Mr. Coles holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in marketing and advertising from California State University, Fullerton. Kris Narayan, Chairman and Founder Transcast was co-founded by Kris Narayan, who also serves as the company's Chairman. Mr. Narayan spearheads Transcast's mission of transforming the television into an interactive platform, making the most popular aspects of the Web available to over 60 million non-Internet households in the US. In addition to overseeing Transcast's long-term strategic direction and establishing key partnerships and alliances, Mr. Narayan draws upon his extensive contacts with the Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Asian venture communities to lead the company's venture fundraising initiatives. Over the past 18 years, Kris Narayan has established a proven track record in executive management, market expansion, business development and various levels of semiconductor and system engineering. After holding senior executive positions at established companies such as Fairchild, DEC, VLSI Technology and Cirrus Logic, Kris extended his experience in consumer electronics and personal computers to emerging markets such as interactive consumer technology and e-commerce broadcasting services. Kris is also the founder of two other Silicon Valley startup companies focused on delivering enhanced television e-commerce services using "smart" television technology: Electronic Home Networks and TeleCruz Technology, a developer of embedded products for interactive television. TeleCruz designs and manufactures integrated circuits and embedded software for the interactive television market. Mr. Narayan received his undergraduate degree in India, and completed his MS in computer engineering at University of Iowa. RANJIT SINGH SAHOTA, Chief Executive Officer & Founder, MetaTV: Ranjit Singh Sahota is the CEO and founder of MetaTV. MetaTV is the leading global provider of integrated broadband TV portal platforms and applications for the interactive television market. Mr. Sahota has over 14 years of successful experience in delivering technology and software systems that benefit the businesses and people of the world. Mr. Sahota founded MetaTV on the simple idea of creating new content and architectures for the new medium and platforms of interactive television. Throughout his career, Mr. Sahota has been recognized for his development of award- winning products, architectures and implementations in a variety of domains including enterprise level Internet architectures, object oriented visual design tools, translators, code generators, semantic networks, communications middleware and application frameworks. He has been credited for inventing intellectual property for the recognition, description, and implementation of object oriented patterns technology in software tools that enable rapid development of high-performance personalized systems. Prior to founding MetaTV, Ranjit Sahota was chief architect at Sterling Software, a 2000 person global software and services company used by Fortune 500 companies around the world. At Sterling, Mr. Sahota was responsible for product architecture, engineering overview, strategic planning and overall technical vision. He developed the company’s software strategy including product definition, globalization and implementation across Sterling’s application development product portfolio with a concentrated focus on enabling mission critical Internet, and Enterprise systems to be distributed across multiple platforms around the world. Mr. Sahota has designed and implemented consumer oriented interactive systems that execute on Windows 95/98/NT, Windows 2000, Windows CE, MacOS, OpenTV, Sony PlayStation, WebTV, PowerTV and Liberate. He has extensive software development expertise in a variety of domains including: content engines, design tools, Internet commerce agents, multi-user persistent environments, commerce frameworks, video processing libraries and MPEG processing components implemented using open standards architectures, technologies and languages. Ranjit Sahota was born in India and immigrated to Canada in 1970 where he later attended Simon Fraser University. He currently lives in Marin County, CA with his wife and son. Bill Sanders, Executive Vice President, Big Ticket Television, a Paramount/Viacom company: Bill Sanders has run Big Ticket Television with President Larry Lyttle since it began in 1994. He developed its first six on-air series including Moesha and Judge Judy, and is leading Big Ticket’s expansion into new media. He has spearheaded Big Ticket’s foray into enhanced television with the interactive Judge Judy on WebTV and broadband trials of Judge Joe Brown. Bill was supervising producer of HBO’s Dream On, a comedy series that won multiple Emmy and CableAce Awards, during its first six seasons. Strongly involved in interactive media, Bill created Dream On forums for several major online services and initiated the development of a Dream On interactive CD-ROM game. Bill also served as the only producer-member of a Universal Television Interactive Task Force, leading efforts to establish Universal’s online presence. While under an exclusive production deal with MCA Television Entertainment during this time, Sanders also developed a series for HBO and executive produced a half hour comedy pilot for CBS starring Nicollette Sheridan through Universal Television. From August 1984 to January 1990, Bill was vice president, original programming, West Coast, for HBO. He developed and supervised production of pilots, specials and series including Ray Bradbury Theater, 1st and Ten, Comic Relief, Glory! Glory! (directed by Lindsay Anderson), Really Weird Tales (starring John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Joe Flaherty), Martin Mull’s History of White People in America, Not Necessarily the News and Dream On, as well as Bob Goldthwait, Harry Shearer, Will Rogers and Paul Reiser specials. Bill first worked with Larry Lyttle from April 1983 through August 1984 as Director, Comedy and Drama Series Development for Warner Brothers Television, where he helped develop numerous network pilots such as Night Court and the Steambath comedy series for Showtime. Prior to Warners, Sanders worked his way up the ranks at ABC, starting in New York as Scenic Services Supervisor in September, 1977 and Studio Coordinator in July, 1978 to Manager, Prime Time Series Development, East Coast, ABC Entertainment in December, 1978. Then in March, 1980, ABC Entertainment West Coast executives Stu Bloomberg, Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey moved Sanders to Los Angeles where as Director, Variety and Late Night Programs, he helped develop and oversee such successful series as That’s Incredible!, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and Fridays (written by Seinfeld’s Larry David and Larry Charles and featuring Michael Richards.) Bill received his Bachelor of Arts with distinction from Stanford University, where he majored in Communication (Broadcasting and Film). He studied for two years in the Master of Fine Arts program in television production at UCLA. Born in New York City, Bill resides in Santa Monica, California with his wife and three children. Kent A. Libbey, Director, Advanced Television Products, Excite@Home: Kent Libbey is responsible for the development of advanced TV products of Excite@Home, integrating the company’s always-on broadband access services and content with broadcast video services provided by the company’s cable television partners. He oversees a staff of 50 people, including product managers, engineers, and user interface designers. Mr. Libbey’s work in interactive television began in 1993 as Director of Product Management for Bell Atlantic Video Services, where he established and lead a staff of marketing and operations professionals, building and running the world’s first all-digital video-on-demand television service trial delivered over DSL. Later, as Vice President of Operations at TELE-TV, a joint venture of Bell Atlantic, Pacific Telesis and NYNEX, Mr. Libbey was in charge of project management, product strategy and operations, as well as information management for a 150-channel broadcast digital television service. After leaving Tele-TV, Mr. Libbey established the Broadband Services Group, a Los Angeles-based management consulting firm, which provided strategic and business development advice to communications and media companies seeking to leverage emerging broadband technologies. Mr. Libbey has also held positions at MCI Communications and McKinsey & Co. and holds a BA from Harvard College and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives with his wife and sons in Menlo Park, California