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Posts tagged ‘IPTV’

Nov 9

I Want My iTV

Cliff Sullivan from BusinessWeek writes,

But I won’t be getting it soon. While the technology is mostly in place, the players—from cable companies to film studios—can’t agree on how to make it happen.

I want to listen to music, have a box pop up on my screen telling me who’s phoning my home, or watch a vacation-themed slide show before forwarding it on to bore my friends on Facebook—all while sitting in front of the set in my living room. No one has yet put this wish list together in one nice, easy-to-use package.

They sure haven’t. As the author correctly points out, the reason is not the technology, but protection of existing business models. No one is addressing the gap between online content and the television.

While new technologies like IPTV bring digital content over IP to a STB connected to a TV, they do nothing to bridge the gap between online media and the TV.

So read the article at the BusinessWeek site and weigh in. What do you think? Is anyone addressing this gap? Do you want to watch online media on your TV? What features would you like to see in an iTV offering?

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Oct 31

Goodbye Myrio

Myrio Logo

Dear friends and colleagues,

As I depart Nokia Siemens Networks (Myrio was acquired in 2005 by Siemens and is now subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks), today marks the end of an era for me–11 amazing years.

When we started working on the technologies that became Myrio, we had a
dream that one day companies all over the world would be delivering TV
services over IP. We were certainly not clairvoyant enough to predict how,
what is now called IPTV, would develop over the coming years, but we knew
the power of Internet combined with entertainment would create amazing new possibilities. Although IPTV seems so “well duh” now, this was not the case–even just 5 years ago.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for
believing in Myrio and the possibilities it created. We could not have done
it without you!

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford.

Full text:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Youtube:

YouTube Preview Image

I want to share a short excerpt from that speech. He said, “You’ve got to
find what you love. [sic]. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the
heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it
just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don’t settle.”

Myrio and IPTV have most certainly been a labor of love.

As I sign off, I extend my best wishes to all of you.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

-ryan

May 8

Set-top Boxes Open Up

Set-top Boxes Open Up

“However, many assert that it’s Microsoft Corp. –which doesn’t make STBs and is often accused of attempting to lock in users to its own priority technologies – that has done the most to advance the role of the set-top box. “

I always love it when a writer makes a vauge reference to some nebulous 3rd party like “many”. Who are these “many”?

I have never met anyone, anywhere that would assert Microsoft has ever done anything but “open” hardware in an attempt to dominate a market. Microsoft creates the appearance of openness while denying to others the benefits thereof.

While multi-function devices like the Xbox 360 are very interesting and may help IPTV service providers differentiate service, remember this too is a Microsoft controlled platform.

Technologies such as OCAP provide a level playing field for a number of companies wishing to innovate on a cable operators network. While OCAP may not prove to be a panacea, technologies such as OCAP, where everyone has access to the platform, will do more to open up the STB market than anything Microsoft has ever or will ever do.

Mar 16

Sizing up the IPTV Experience

Sean Buckley of Telecommunications magazine writes that one quote from the IPTV World Forum in London really stood out for him. That quote, from Accenture’s Arjang Zadeh, stated “quality, not content, is king.” Well, yes and no. It is not that simple, let me explain.

Why would such a quote stand out in Mr. Buckley’s mind? Well, as he goes on to explain, it hits home for him because of problems he encounters with his current provider, Comcast. Fortunately, one of the problems Mr. Buckley describes with Comcast, the transient but eerily predictable, “timeout” error when trying to access the On Demand service, can most likely be explained as an artifact of delivering a two-way service over a network originally designed to support one-way video. Press, On Demand again, and everything works fine. Strange.

IPTV is not immune from “strange” quirks either. In fact ANY digital service is subject to these “quirks”. You see with an analog TV signal (really any analog signal, but we are talking IPTV here) there is a graceful degradation of quality–without entirely interrupting the video program. Remember snow? Depending on the strength of the analog signal you have a really great picture or you have a less than great picture but you have one. In a digital system, digital cable, satellite or IPTV, the degradation is less graceful. Depending on what bits are lost, the picture may still look great, there may be “macroblocking” or the picture may drop entirely. Any of these digital artifacts may occur to cable, satellite or IPTV. Our experience in the field showed us that subscribers that came directly to IPTV from an analog service (Off Air, analog cable) were more sensitive by the digital artifacts. Those that had previous “digital experience” were less sensitive to the artifacts. Makes sense, now.

Without describing in full detail all the of mechanisms available in an IPTV system to ensure Quality of Experience (QoE), suffice it to say, there are several just at the network level which ensure the reliable delivery of packets to the IPTV STB. Of course, IPTV benefits from its inherit support of two-way traffic (unlike the CATV network to which two-way capability has been added).

Furthermore, QoE depends not only on the effectiveness of the network (core, transport, access), but the experience provided by the software platform. Just ask any subscriber of early stage IPTV deployments. Our early customers and their subscribers suffered through painful stages of learning–ours and the service providers–as the industry learned to deliver video over the telecom network reliably. These are the pains I have recently written about for the AT&T Uverse deployment.

However, content is an integral part of QoE and cannot be excluded from analysis. What we (my employer, Siemens Communications) have learned from our leading IPTV customer Belgacom, is that content remains king. This is where I believe I part ways with Messrs Buckley and Zadeh.

Belgacom learned is if licensing premium content was king, licensing exclusive content is like being the galactic emperor. Through their licensing of Belgian Premiere soccer, they attracted and more importantly retain subscribers. As you might expect from any relatively new technology, there have been QoE issues at Belgacom. However, understanding that great content is part of the overall QoE has been critical to the rapid success of BelgacomTV. A lesson for all IPTV service providers..

Mar 1

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Ready or Not, AT&T Sells Uverse

Om Malik, from Gigaom (see links on right), has written a piece on AT&T Uverse deployment of the Microsoft IPTV platform.

It is hard to get a grip on AT&T’s IPTV efforts. Dubbed Uverse, some say AT&T’s television service it is still stuck in neutral, plagued by technical problems. AT&T, however feels otherwise, and has started making a strong marketing push for the service, according to a report in San Antonio-Express News. The company claims that it has ironed out all the technical glitches and is now ready to take on the cable operators.

We’re ready to take our foot off the brake and step on the accelerator, John Stankey, AT&T’s group president for operations, said Tuesday. By the end of the year, we will be up and running in every significantly sized market where we operate.

Fascinating, since it was only a couple of months ago that the company’s tech troubles were highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, pointing to the problems with Microsoft IPTV software.

From everything I know from publicly available sources and people close to the Microsoft product, the Uverse deployment is stabilizing (apparently, enought that AT&T feels compelled to begin limited rollouts), however the actual deployed service will have far fewer features than AT&T had hoped for and an order of magnitude fewer features than the Microsoft marketing machine has been pitching for the past 2 years.

The actual Uverse product looks very little like what Microsoft has been showing to the market–at trade shows and other public events. Many features of dubious customer value, like “instant channel change” are conspicuously absent from the Uverse deployment. However, their absence is not by choice, but due to poor architectural choices and a poor understanding of service provider economics. It looks like Microsoft is learning the hard lessons about building a scalable IPTV solution–lessons the rest of the industry learned years ago. It would also appear AT&T is learning a tough lesson about listening to the Redmond marketing machine.

Unfortunately for AT&T, the next lessons will be even more painful as their “partner” begins competing with them for their own customers. Just look at what’s happening with Xbox Cinema on Xbox Live. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure their brand remains prominent in their IPTV offering. There will be no question in the mind of Uverse users that they are using a Microsoft product (insert joke here).

The Uverse service gives Microsoft a prime opportunity to upsell subscribers to other Microsoft products like Media Center PCs, powered by Vista and mobile devices powered by Windows Mobile. These devices do not have to be connected to the AT&T Uverse service but connected directly to Microsoft “over the top” of AT&T.

Thus far, Microsoft has played nice (relatively speaking) with its service provider customers in the mobile arena. This is not surprising when you recognize that they have the financial resources and investor backing to be very very patient when entering new markets. However, just as the success of the iPod precipiated Microsoft dumping its “Plays for sure” partners and building their own “iPod killer”, the Zune, I believe the iPhone will inspire the monopolists in Redmond to take a harder stance with wireless operators and begin to push for concessions that give them more control over the mobile devices running Windows–just as they do on PCs today. The emphasis for Microsoft will shift from providing capabilities that give wireless operators the platform and toolsets to build compelling wireless features, to the virtues Windows Mobile for the wireless consumer. The service providers differentiation and value add will diminish to the point that the average mobile consumer won’t care from whom they get the service, but only that they have the latest version of Windows Mobile and Microsoft mobile applications (has anyone seen this movie before?).

This same fate awaits AT&T in their wireline business as their Uverse subscribers increasingly look for Windows and Windows applications, caring less and less about the network (and service provider) that delivers them. The next few years should be interesting.

Jan 29

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Gates says TV is doomed, Internet where it’s at

Speaking to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates looked deep into his crystal ball and prognosticated that in 5 years, TV will be a lame duck and watching video on the internet will be all the rage. Way to go out on a limb Bill.

“Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it,” he said. Tivo has been doing this for years, and most cable and satellite providers offer PVR options.  Maybe Bill just doesn’t watch a lot of TV.

From Grant Robertson @ Download Squad, “What wider adoption of internet distributed video will bring and what the heads of major networks and news organizations should be up nights worrying about is democratization of content creation. More and more we’re finding great entertainment in low-buck, short format indie video and, in five years, the upper echelon of 15-24 year olds who are currently rocking the funny on sites like YouTube will be a force to reckon with, possibly even taking notches out of networks like Fox and NBC.

What’s stopping this all from happening immediately? Two things, monetization of content and a simple and ubiquitous TV/internet convergence device. For certain, any company who manages to solve either of those problems and catch the wave of public acceptance is headed for a big payday.”

Jan 29

Tech Trends for 2007

Tom Giles from BusinessWeek explores the top tech trends for 2007. The article briefly discusses IPTV and the need to “keep it simple”. This is certainly easier said than done. With IPTV service providers anxious to differentiate their offerings from cable or satellite, the last thing they want is to keep it simple. In fact, our customer push us to deliver more and more functionality on more and more devices (STBs). Until a service provider has breakout success, and can define a winning service offering, the pressure to push the boundaries of hardware and software in IPTV will not subside.

Jobs and his nifty cell phone didn’t steal all the thunder building in Las Vegas, where eyes fixed on Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and other executives who promulgated visions of delivering entertainment over the Internet through a technology known as Internet protocol TV, or IPTV. The technology’s boosters haven’t made much headway in the past in part because they’ve failed to make IPTV easy to use. That’s poised to change this year, writesBusinessWeek correspondent Cliff Edwards, so long as software, hardware, and consumer electronics bear in mind a simple lesson concerning IPTV: Keep it simple.

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Jan 6

Who will bring the Internet to your TV?

As the hype builds for CES, the New York Times divides the competitors for your living room into three categories. The Incumbents like HBO already have a stake in America’s TV market. Latching on to them are the Extenders, who provide the actual devices to link up with your PC. Finally, the Straight Shooters bridge the gap with software.

Get ready: we’re about to hear a confusing array of new plans to bring the boundless realm of the Internet to the 83-year-old TV. The companies involved are taking one of three markedly different approaches. So before we head into the geeks’ version of Super Bowl week, let’s do a quick and dirty review of the three kinds of contenders.

The Incumbents: cable and satellite firms try to get hip.
They are the favorites in this battle to bring Internet-style choice to the TV. Not because companies like Comcast are great innovators (they’re not), but because their boxes already sit in millions of homes. But they have an Achilles heel: their sacred relationships with programmers. If Comcast were to allow customers to download any movie from the Web, HBO and Showtime would be furious. Expect them to move slowly, which opens the door for…

The Extenders: sending video from the PC to the TV.
We can now download all this great video our PCs. But it really belongs on our TVs. What’s the answer? Send it from point A to point B. This is what Apple hopes to accomplish with its upcoming iTV, which Steve Jobs will unveil on Tuesday at Macworld. The biggest problem with this approach: it is indirect, and home networks are tough to set up. Apple might crack the code, but so far these products haven’t really flown.

The Straight Shooters: new Internet services for the living room.
These companies (like Akimbo and other startups) attack the problem more directly, giving couch potatoes a new set-top box, remote-control and connection from the Internet to the TV. Microsoft and Sony could also try this approach by retrofitting their gaming consoles, the PlayStation 3 and xBox 360, for Web downloads. The biggest challenge: getting average couch potatoes to bring a whole new piece of electricity-guzzling machinery into their living room.

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Jan 6

Siemens vs. Microsoft on IPTV

Over at ITVT, there is a two part interview with representatives from Siemens and Microsoft debating their varying approaches to IPTV technologies and the market. Of course, I am biased as my team and I make many of the decisions about the Siemens approach to the market as well as many of the technology choices in our solution.

It will be very interesting to hear the Microsoft marketing machine as they respond to our perspective as captured in part one.   The Microsoft marketing machine has typically done a very good job in “responding” to critical reviews of their IPTV solution.

For those of you who don’t understand the approach Microsoft has taken in IPTV, it is classic Microsoft..  Take the best ideas from the market leaders (embrace), and modify the established approach to enhance your competitive position (extend).

For IPTV,  Microsoft used several plays from this well worn playbook. For example, Microsoft embraced much of the established ideas in IPTV, but they created a new feature they call “instant channel change” (ICC).  Before Microsoft came into the market, no one knew they needed  ”instant” channel change, but Microsoft’s marketing team has convinced many telco executives that they must have ICC.  In my view, this is not exactly the kind of disruptive feature a telco needs to convince a customer to leave cable or satellite and move to IPTV.

What Microsoft does not tell customers, is that to achieve a nearly instant channel change,  it requires a completely proprietary broadcast architecture, deviating from accepted IPTV architectures, with extensive and costly use of unicast, and a complete dependency on Microsoft technologies (codec, DRM, streaming servers etc.).  Complete technology lock in and reliance on Microsoft.  Who really benefits from instant channel change, well Microsoft, of course.  As we and others began to question the market value of such a feature, the market finally took a critical look at Microsoft’s approach.

In the end, the technological complexity (think cost, $$$) required by the Microsoft approach and the fact that it relies on Microsoft server software (which everyone knows is not even close to carrier grade), can not be justified by the business case.  Will instant channel change come to a TV near you, possibly, but a number of vendors have shown a way to achieve the same result by using a standards based approach–with no Microsoft lock in.

Instant channel change is just one example, but Microsoft has been very quiet about most of their competitive differentiators as of late.  Why?  Well, they are under the gun to get AT&T working beyond trial subscribers.

Of course the Microsoft marketing machine would have us all believe they have “launched”, well that is a matter of perspective.  My belief is that AT&T cannot deploy anywhere, anytime to any subscriber nor can they market the service at full speed because Microsoft is still working through service debilitating bugs and cannot show the scalability that AT&T needs to go full speed ahead.

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Nov 27

Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment

Rafat Ali from PaidContent.org quotes Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang’s report on, Long Tail, but focuses on what he calls the mid part of the content and distribution value chain, where he sees the most value in the long run…that mid part is the part of aggregation-and-context players in the market, with the theory that “Value of aggregation and brands increases with exponential increase in content choices.”

Bear Stearns released an analyst report from Spencer Wang taking a look at online video trends [PDF]. While paidContent says that it largely states the obvious, it’s interesting to me to see how the firm backed up the Chris Andersen’s “Long Tail” rhetoric with some external analysis finding the idea holds for web video.

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The most interesting data related to what type of video monetization was acceptable to consumers, as well as how behavior was changing in terms of finding new content. Forty-eight percent of survey respondents preferred free video after pre-roll ads, compared to only 45 percent who weren’t interested in any ads at all. Thirty-four percent of users primarily found video through search engines such as Yahoo or Google. But in the demographic sweet spot — men aged 18 to 34 — the acceptability of pre-rolls shot up to 67 percent and the primary discovery means were emails and other contacts from peers and central video sites like YouTube instead of search engines.

Granted, analyst reports from investors should be taken with a grain of salt — though Bear Stearns has done business with everyone from Google to Viacom. The passion against pre-rolls is certainly evident here at NewTeeVee, and the options given in terms of other monetization were subscriptions, paid downloads and none at all. Clickable ads, bugs, mid-rolls and other options weren’t presented. But the demographic shift, certainly, held in other areas of the report:

[W]hen we queried, “What types of videos do you like to watch?,” UGC ranked surprisingly high, as the second most popular content category across all respondents. In the target market of M18-34, UGC is the single most popular content category.

Wang hammers this point to counter the “content is king” outlook by pointing out that no network or studio has ever been able to guarantee the quality and popularity of programming. Inversely, the “paradox of choice” makes the free-for-all online just as big a turn off as the latest Brett Ratner schlockfest.

By playing an editorial role and shaping chosen content to appeal to specific audiences, aggregators can more easily sustain rabid audience interest and will likely be the big winners. Think lifestyle brands like Vice, the niche-focused Next New Networks, YouTube’s focus on community tools, and the automated item suggestions by NetFlix and Amazon as a sign of things to come.

“These themes will likely play out over the long run and may not necessarily affect near-term estimates or operating fundamentals of the major media conglomerates,” Wang concedes. But the if the parallels with the textual web drawn by Wang and trend data from the young adult male demographic are any indication, these companies could be facing a similar future to that of print media sooner rather than later.

Here’s an updated report by Spencer Wang at Bear Stearns (March 2008)

Bear Stearns – Internet Video – Mar 6 2008

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