For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment
Search for IPTV on the internet and you are likely to find the
home page of Iowa public television. While there is nothing wrong with that
august institution, those living outside the United States might wonder why
their local broadband supplier has signed up with a Midwest American
broadcaster.
When the boffins looked for a catchy name for internet protocol
television in 1995, they must have spent a lot of time in focus groups before
finally deciding to name it IP/TV, which seemed such a good idea that it was
crowned with a trademark. Their first efforts failed to make any discernable
impact on consumers, however, so they went back to the image consultants and
returned with IPTV, which it has remained ever since.
After 15 years in the melting pot of ever-changing technology,
IPTV has started finally to capture public imagination. A recent survey from
analysts Point Topic for the Broadband Forum shows that France tops the global
league table with over 8 million subscribers watching IPTV, amounting to 42% of
all broadband users there. Next, some way behind, are the US and China. By the
end of 2009, there were more than 33 million homes in the world with IPTV, a
year-on year-increase of 47%, the survey said,
For those still confused by the link with public TV from Iowa,
this might be a good moment to clarify the confusion. Thanks to Informa
Telecoms and Media Principal Analyst, Simon Murray, who was speaking this week
at the sixth IPTV World Forum, we learn that IPTV means different things in
different countries. The French are happy with programmes that come through
their phone line even if they are not sure how it is done. In the UK and other
parts of the world, broadband enthusiasts who are quite content to watch
programmes from the likes of BBC iPlayer and Hulu have been referring blithely
to the service as IPTV, when it is clearly OTT (Over The Top) television.
In the UK, of course, we’ve been used to TV that was OTT for many
years, starting around the time of “Monty Python”, but this is something
completely different. The rate of change being so rapid in this industry,
however, by the third day of the conference both IPTV and OTT had been replaced
by another term altogether.
Telecom solutions provider Huawei Director of Marketing David
Strehlow told a shocked audience: “IPTV is not IPTV any more. It has morphed
into the Digital Home!”
Strehlow went on to say that Huawei customers are already “making
millions from OTT”, and that with the arrival of the Digital Home there will be
no significant divide between OTT and IPTV.
So what will the Digital Home ever do for us? You mean, aside from
provide a completely integrated home network, a world in which no device is an
island and every consumer electronics box talks to all the others in the same
language? Well, exactly that, actually.
Despite the best efforts of the vested interests who produce these
things, the multitude of boxes, cables, networks and other technical
necessities are becoming – horror of horrors – compatible. No longer will
customers for the new technology need five different plugs to fit into four
different sockets. Silently and often wirelessly, the technology links up.
Without the need to explain why hardware should be at the heart of
the connected home of the future, speaker after speaker at the IPTV conference
stood up and extolled the merits of the “secret sauce” that is going to make
everybody rich. Yes, it’s content!
Content “over the top” (OTT) is epitomised by the BBC iPlayer,
Spotify and SeeSaw. It is delivered over what the experts like to call “the
open internet”. Users go to their chosen web site, pay a subscription (or get
it free) and stream content to anywhere in the home. As long as the connection
is fast enough, and not too many other users are trying to get online at the
same time, OTT works very well.
Holding back OTT services back until recently has been the fact
that it almost always meant watching on a desktop or laptop computer, with none
of the benefits of family viewing around the fire. Both TV and computing have
moved on, and in the Digital Home every screen is just a screen, wherever it is
located, and sound and pictures can be distributed to any or all of them.
As this week’s deal between Google, Intel and Sony indicates, the
TV is no longer a dedicated device set up purely for the purpose of watching
home entertainment. In the brave new world we will all have Google TV and
perhaps the term “television” itself will cease to have a significant meaning.
There is the “anywhere, everywhere” proposition, typified by taking content
with you on a journey that starts in the kitchen, continues on the train and
ends in the office — although that may be taking the Digital Home too far.
When the internet was conceived, every device attached to the
network needed a unique “address” that would say where data came from, where it
was going and what “protocol” or language each device could understand. As with
an international phone number, an IP address is a unique identifier, which
should exist in only one place on the planet.
Once you know how your data should be formatted and where it is
going, you can ensure it arrives at the right place, the right time, and in
perfect condition. Unlike the constantly changing and inherently unstable world
of the open internet, so the story goes, an IPTV connection can guarantee the
quality of service that subscribers pay for.
That argument, suitably translated, has found favour with the
French and, together with a high-speed broadband infrastructure, subscribers
are happy with IPTV entertainment. Unlike OTT video, glitches and buffering are
rare, and figures from around the world show a consistently high level of
customer satisfaction with IPTV services.
As a result of the move to secure reliable delivery, content
owners have started to deal directly with the operators. João Mendes Pedro,
Marketing Manager of IPTV operator Clix in Portugal, told Cue Entertainment:
“We’ve been trying to negotiate directly with companies such as Warner, Disney
and Sony since 2005. At first, they referred us to third parties but for the
past two years we have been talking directly to the major content owners and it
has been worth the wait. Now we have an excellent relationship and our sales
team is winning market share from cable operators.”
From a total of 3.6 million Portuguese households, 1 million are
already passed by the fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections that will make
advanced services such as Video On Demand, digital video recording and PayTV
possible.
Add the Digital Home to the high-speed FTTH network and just one
thing more is needed – investment to make it happen. That’s where the Broadband
Forum comes in: to bring together the diverse technical standards and ensure a
trouble-free uniform package for the home.
For operators, there is a real financial incentive in replacing
the incompatible first- and second-generation dumb boxes in many broadband
households. The smart hardware of tomorrow requires little installation or
configuration. It allows remote diagnosis of problems and connects
automatically with everything else in the Digital Home. This means an end to
the majority of expensive technical support and fewer, if any, house calls. The
money saved can be used to upgrade the network and we all get to watch it in
our Digital Homes, and forget about IPTV.
Which will be good news for Iowa public television.
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