For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment
The wind
of change blew through the home entertainment market last week and brought The
Cloud with it to cast doubts on the future of the dedicated set-top box (STB).
BSkyB
announced Sky Go, an online service that will be free to current Sky customers
anywhere in the UK and Ireland. In California earlier in the week, Microsoft,
Sony and Apple set out plans that will involve the purchase by consumers of yet
more branded hardware and will have a profound effect on how we access content.
The very
future of the STB is under threat from some of the biggest names in consumer
electronics, as streaming premium video direct to the home via high-speed
broadband becomes a viable proposition. When former Asda boss Alan Leighton
takes over as Chairman of STB manufacturer Pace later this year, his promised
strategic review will need to consider more than supply chain problems and
lower margins.
The battle
for connected eyeballs between the avatars of connected TV, Xbox and
PlayStation could equal any role-playing game in its ferocity. The casualties
that ensue could be dramatic, especially for leading STB manufacturers such as
Pace, Cisco and Huawei.
The Xbox
took centre stage at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) gaming conference
in Los Angeles at the start of the month in a presentation that delivered its
core message loud and clear: Microsoft wants a bigger slice of the home
entertainment market and the Xbox 360 is at the heart of its strategy.
“We are
transforming entertainment in the living room by bringing you more
entertainment experiences and new ways to enjoy them,” said Xbox Live VP Mark
Whitten at E3. He added that long-form content from sources such as the
pioneering 4oD service would soon be available on Xbox through YouTube,
alongside video from Sky in the UK, Canal+ in France or Hulu Plus and Netflix
in the US.
Possibly
the most visible threat to the existing ecosystem will be the addition of the
Microsoft search engine Bing to the Xbox Live interface. Most observers have
scoffed rightly at the idea of using a keyboard to enter search queries into an
Electronic Programme Guide (EPG), and Microsoft is not about to challenge this
view. Xbox Live adds Kinect voice control to the EPG so that users say simply
what they wish to watch, and Bing plays it.
The
demonstration at E3 showed how almost every function of the Xbox is accessible
by voice commands. “Xbox Bing X-men”, for example, brings up on screen not just
games but the “X-Men” films and animated series. Say “Xbox Play X-Men First
Class” and the film streams to your screen. “TV on Xbox becomes more amazing
when you are the controller,” said Whitten.
The
instant and relevant results displayed by Microsoft’s Bing search engine could
consign the remote to the place it has traditionally occupied – behind the
cushion on the sofa. Xbox Live is now the most powerful STB you can buy – and
apparently you can use it to play games as well.
Sony
delivered a similar message in Los Angeles. Consumer Products & Services
President Kazou Hirai said, “The world of entertainment has undergone a
significant change since we launched PlayStation Network (PSN). We can attest
to the importance of having that connected experience across all our products;
devices that are connected to content and, of course, connected to each other.”
PlayStation
3 has long been the console of choice for users who want the best of all worlds
– partly because of the in-built Blu-ray drive, which has helped to build
demand in the US to the point where 49% of owners view Blu-ray titles on their
PlayStation 3 at least once a month, according to research organisation NPD.
Perhaps as the result of the recent difficulties experienced by PSN, the focus
at E3 was on delivery of PlayStation content to other devices including Android
smart phones and tablets, and especially the PlayStation Portable’s successor,
the PlayStation Vita.
“We have
created our next generation portable to be one that breaks traditional
boundaries of entertainment,” said Hirai, who promised new ways to interact
with “your world, your friends and your entertainment.” The PS Vita will use
the AT&T network and 23,000 WiFi hotspots in the US to connect to the cloud
and to other devices. The focus is on the connected experience using
earth-bound wireless services rather than cable and satellite connections that
tie the device to an outlet on the wall.
At the
Moscone Centre in San Francisco, 400 miles northwest of the E3 venue, Apple CEO
Steve Jobs explained the mysteries of iCloud to devotees attending the World
Wide Developers Conference (WWDC). “It stores your content and wirelessly
pushes it to all your devices,” he said, which might seem a “me-too” idea at
first sight but embedded in his remarks were two important ideas that make
iCloud stand out from the crowd.
The
concept of “pushing” content to the user, rather than “retrieving it” from the
cloud is the first thing to note. The second is the idea that your Apple
devices are all part of a single ecosystem. Each gives access to all your files
wherever you may be without the need for the user to be involved actively in
copying files from one device to another.
Most
services treat cloud storage as an extra hard drive on the subscriber’s device,
somewhere that is secure, stored in a data centre many miles away and available
for users to download whenever they wish. Once Apple receives a file at one of
the data centres built specifically to support iCloud, it “pushes” it back out
to every other Apple device registered in the user’s name. Photos taken on an
iPhone in Ibiza, for example, will be accessible almost immediately on an Apple
TV back home in Ipswich without any intervention on the part of the user.
To avoid
filling local drives, iCloud leaves only the previous 1,000 files on each
device although the originals remain available up to the five-gigabyte limit.
This push technology is not an original concept but as with most Apple ideas,
this time “it just works.”
Then there
is Match, a subscription service that matches the music you own that didn’t
come from iTunes with tracks from the library of almost 18 million tunes that
Apple has already encoded. This avoids the need to spend weeks uploading
existing mp3 files to your space in the cloud, since it is probable that Apple
already has a high-quality streaming version in its library, ready to play on
any device you own. Only the thrash metal tracks laid down by your school chums
in 1987, or similarly obscure recordings, will need uploading.
The iTunes
Match music service starts later this year in the US, but negotiations with the
labels and PRS in the UK could hold the service back here until 2012. There is
no technical reason why iTunes Match should not apply to video as well. Is it
possible that one day in the future, digital copies of every film ever made
will be held at data centres around the world, ready to stream to any (Apple)
device that asks for it? If you think not, then be mindful that the music
industry thought that way too.
Sky Go is
a combination of Sky Player and Sky Mobile TV and from July 6 the service will
deliver live linear channels and VOD content to two registered mobile devices
per Sky household, free of charge. Existing subscribers will be able to receive
Sky News, the five Sky Sports channels and ESPN on their smart phone or tablet
at no extra charge. Customers with laptops and other computers have access to
more than 30 live channels and “an extensive library of on-demand content” – so
far unspecified. Non-Sky customers pay between £15 and £40 monthly for Sky Go
and the existing Sky Player services on Xbox and Fetch TV remain unchanged,
other than re-branding as Sky.
Sky
acquired the public WiFi network known as The Cloud earlier this year and Sky
Go will leverage its 4,500 hotspots to ensure widespread access for
subscribers. However, any Sky customer connecting through the 3G network will
find that although access to Sky Go might be free, substantial data charges
will almost certainly apply.
The Sky Go
announcement underscores the depth of the challenge that confronts conventional
STB manufacturers, which include Amstrad, makers of the Sky+ box. Frankly, with
so much intelligence built in to smart phones, tablets and domestic TVs, do we
need them any more?
The STB is
just an add-on device that connects new services to existing TVs and provides
conditional access to premium content from subscription services. The TiVo box
made for Virgin Media by Cisco records up to three channels at a time on one
terabyte of hard disk storage. It includes the catch-up TV service from BBC
iPlayer, a remote control that needs a pilot’s licence to operate and a list
price tag of around £200 for new customers, much less for existing subscribers.
Given the
imminent arrival of connected online services and delivery of content from the
cloud, these boxes seem overpriced and curiously outdated – particularly if you
are lucky enough to have a high-speed Virgin Media connection.
The
PlayStation 3 sells at about the same price as the TiVo but includes a Blu-ray
player. The Xbox 360 is available for around £160. These devices offer
considerably less on-board storage than the TiVo or Sky+ boxes but that will
hardly matter when content in the cloud becomes more widely available.
Microsoft
claims that Xbox 360 gives you “more reasons to stay on the sofa”. They might
well be right.
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