Liberty Media Pursues Interactive Content for Television and Pc’s

Liberty Media, headed by former TCI chief John Malone, has formed a new subsidiary, Liberty Livewire, that plans to integrate content for the Web during the creation of films, TV and advertising instead of doing it afterwards.

With the purchase of three of Hollywood’s largest post-production companies scheduled to be completed later this summer, Liberty is positioning itself as a vehicle for delivery of broadband content over cable modems and phone lines to televisions, PC’s, Internet Appliances and theme parks.

Some of the company’s plans include a high-capacity server network for caching multimedia programming and elements, electronic cinema distribution for theaters, interactive video programming and advertisements and interactive delivery to nontraditional venues such as theme parks, restaurants and malls.

One of the stumbling blocks of delivering to the home the content that Liberty Livewire will produce, has been the slow development of interoperable set-top boxes with plenty of computing power that customers can purchase at retail stores and could be used on any cable system.

The industry’s OpenCable project says that they have developed standards for allowing interoperability for hardware, but not software.