IDTV

Connected TV blog launched in beta

Well, the new blog mentioned in my previous post is now up and running, at least in beta, here.

It includes the majority of the old posts from this blog, but for the time being I'm keeping IDTV going since it provides an easy interface to my old website, idtv.co.uk (see page listings in left-hand side-bar), which still seems to be garnering a fair amount of traffic.

New blog about to be launched - watch this space

Farncombe Technology, my new employer, has agreed to allow me to launch a new group blog about the future of television, which they will host. This will shortly see the light of day, and will incorporate the previous posts from the IDTV blog.

When it goes live, this page will automatically redirect to it. Meanwhile, I am trying to work out what to do with the old idtv.co.uk News and FAQs linked to from this page (which still seem to be attracting a lot of traffic even though they haven't been updated for ages!).

Watch this space....

MHP at the cross-roads

CableLabs - the US cable TV standards body - has finally published my overview of the MHP market in their SPECS newsletter (click here for the article).

Two related developments that were too late to make it into the piece:

1. Italy's Senate approved a budget bill for 2007 just before Christmas that includes a measure aimed at subsidising integrated digital TV sets (IDTVs), and which the digital-terrestrial TV lobby would dearly like to make conditional on MHP being included in the sets. If so, it would represent another big boost for the European interactive TV standard (which, incidentally, is included as part of the DVD Blu-Ray spec). Full story in this week's New Media Markets.
2. Via Licensing, the LA-based outfit which brings together the MHP patent holders in a patent licensing pool, tells me the patent-holders still haven't signed off on the MHP patent licensing agreements. Given that all it takes is a simple signature, there must be something afoot, surely (sign-off was expected by early autumn 2006). Rumour has it that one of the patent-holders could have dropped out.

Mobile TV: the evidence reviewed

On Tuesday I gave a presentation to the 'DVD and Beyond' conference in London about Mobile TV, which came to the conclusion (among other things) that DVB-H was the most likely standard to be adopted in Europe; that there was a market for broadcast television to handheld devices, but not a mass-market one; and that the business model looked exceedingly risky.

The presentation contained a lot of detailed research evidence from a wide variety of sources, and visitors to this blog who are interested in the topic can download the presentation here (but be warned, it's a zipped 3 Meg file!).

In an email to me after the conference, its organizer, Dr Jean-Luc Renaud, told me: "Your ability to present dense and complicated material in a user-friendly way is legendary, and I learnt an amazing amount about mobile TV." I hope you do, too!

Sky buys into ITV

"British Sky Broadcasting Group plc ('BSkyB') announces that it has acquired a
stake in ITV plc ('ITV'). BSkyB has today acquired 696 million shares,
representing 17.9 per cent of the issued share capital of ITV, at a price of 135
pence per share. The total consideration amounts to approximately GBP 940
million, which will be funded from the group's existing cash balances and its
currently undrawn revolving credit facility." Link: BSkyB - Corporate - Press Release.

Well, I guess that scuppers NTL's proposed acquisition of ITV! It also probably scuppers the BBC/ITV Freesat initiative... 

As always with BSkyB, one has to admire their audacity.... Wonder what Ofcom will say?

Sling to your cell

Uncertainties over the viability of mobile TV business plans have increased following the announcement that the Slingbox technology will be extended to encompass mobile phones.

A Slingbox essentially lets you watch what appears on your TV set anywhere in the world on a laptop via a broadband connection. Now 3G operator 3UK has done a deal with Sling to allow you to do that on your cellphone.

Because of the unexpectedly high amount of in-home viewing that trials of mobile broadcast TV have demonstrated, any commercial services were always going to be ripe for cannibalisation from Freeview (once it became portable) and pay-TV operators like Sky (once they decided to invest in portable PVRs).

But Sling poses a fresh threat to the mobile TV model outside the home, because the thinking was always that there was 'unused airtime' to be exploited by consumers on long commutes. Sling-enabled 3G phones can now shoehorn themselves into this space, too, without anyone having to invest in expensive new mobile broadcast networks.

The beauty of the Sling model is that the mobile network operator doesn't have to broadcast a large amount of TV channels: in effect, the consumer deploys their own in-home TV set-up as a sort of domestic video-on-demand server. Definitely a development to watch....

Sky Broadband? Not for me...

Am I alone in being underwhelmed by BSkyB's new broadband venture (see here for their latest quarterly figures)? After heavily marketing their new broadband service, they have secured one million registrations - but only connected up 74,000 customers. By my calculations, that's a conversion rate of just 7.4 per cent.

I wonder how many people realize what the process is: you register the fact that you're interested, and then you have to wait for their sales people to contact you to 'invite' you to purchase the Sky broadband package. Only at that point are you categorised as having made an order.

So when Sky talks of '20,000' orders a week, this is nothing to do with demand: it's just the maximum figure their sales teams are able to manage.

I should know: I registered my interest in July and I've yet to be contacted by a sales team, although I've had three letters since then saying, effectively, 'we'll get round to you eventually.'

Well, I'm not waiting any longer. Later this week, I'm swapping back to BT from NTL. I wonder how many other would-be Sky Broadband purchasers have made the same decision... 

Are TV ads an aberration?

Most advertising doesn’t interrupt your attention. Think of what you do when you read a magazine, for instance. You either read the editorial, or flip through the pages looking for something that interests you. If you happen to spot an interesting ad on the way, you stop and look at it. But the ad doesn’t interrupt you without your consent.

Same with a poster. You’re walking along the street, or driving through it, and the billboards just pass you by – again, you only focus on them if there is some image or word on them that triggers your attention. But even when they’ve caught your attention, you’re free to move your focus elsewhere.

The key in both cases is that you can actually continue doing something else (reading, walking or driving) if you want to – rather than look at the ad, that is.

Pop-up ads on the Internet might appear to be a counter-example to this. But while they are doubtless irritating, you can (or should) always be able to close them with a single click – the equivalent of just walking on. And advertisers are realizing they’re decreasingly effective, anyway, precisely because of their irritation factor.

Radio advertising might, perhaps, appear to undermine the case I’m making. I’m listening to a newscast or a music track, and up comes the ad. There’s nothing I can do about it. But listening to the radio is, typically, something that doesn’t take up 100% of someone’s attention. Listeners can be doing pretty much anything else, in fact, and generally do: they listen while working, driving, cooking, cleaning, reading the paper - even making love. Very few people, I would guess, actually turn the radio on, sit down in a chair next to it, and just listen without doing anything else. So a radio ad really isn’t that interruptive.

That’s what different about TV. Traditionally, it has been a very focussed, engaging activity – as anyone knows who’s been shushed when a family is viewing a favourite soap together. The only thing most people can do when an ad comes on, and they don’t want to watch it, is get up and go out of the room. Otherwise, you’re forced to put up with the interruption.

The extent to which TV hijacks our attention during commercials is illustrated by the large amount of ad-skipping that goes on in households equipped with the technology to do it - such as personal video recorders (PVRs) or a ‘video-on-demand’ (VOD) enabled set-top box. The fact is, television is such a compelling experience that no-one likes it being interrupted. A PVR simply allows you to do with the TV what you’ve always done with magazines, which is to flick through what doesn’t interest you.

On this basis, you could look upon the new, ‘on-demand’ paradigm of television viewing as evidence of the advertising world simply returning to its proper role – if you like, as servant rather than master.

Interestingly, all of the evidence about teenage viewing habits is that teens – unlike their elders – don’t watch television in the same focused way. A typical teen will be chatting on MSN, listening to their iPod, and texting on their mobile – often all three together – when the TV’s under their ostensible control. As they mature, that mode of viewing will become the norm. Television won’t even be able to interrupt if it tries, being treated rather as radio is today.

The medium will, meanwhile, find other ways to fund itself. We may be prepared to sell our personal profiles in exchange for receiving only those ads that are personally targeted at us – or pay (as people already do with subscription VOD services) to watch TV without any ads at all. Either way, the classic, undifferentiated, 30-second interruptive spot is, in the long run, as dead as a dodo. It’s a wonder people ever accepted them in the first place!

IPTV may have a scalability issue

A company that supplies technology to the IPTV industry held a press event the other day, and spent quite a lot of time dissing Microsoft TV. Their main accusation was that Microsoft’s IPTV software solution wasn’t scalable, and they predicted that none of the so-called Tier 1 telcos that had adopted the Gates technology would have more than 20,000 subs by next year (i.e. 2007).

Actually, their criticism wasn’t confined to Microsoft. “Scalability of IPTV has been the biggest bugbear of IPTV,” said the company’s CEO, admitting that his main problem hadn’t been gaining market share for his particular product, but that the market had ended up being much smaller than predicted.

It’s interesting that, in the weeks that followed, two Belgian telcos, Belgacom and Telenet, announced the results of their respective digital TV deployments, and with vastly different results. Belgacom’s much-hyped launch last July had garnered just 33,000 subs by year-end 2005, while rival Flemish cable company Telenet, launching several months later, and to a smaller constituency, had notched up well over 100,000 (the precise results are due to be revealed today (Tuesday 28^th Feb)).

So what’s the difference? One can surely not dismiss the possibility that Telenet’s content offering was simply more attractive to potential subscribers. But (a) Belgacom managed to out-bid it last year for exclusive access to Belgian premier league football matches and (b) Belgacom carries exactly the same services from Flemish pubcaster VRT that Telenet does. So, at least on the face of it, Belgacom’s content should match Telenet’s in attractiveness.

There is a significant technical difference between the two services, however. Belgacom’s was a proprietary IPTV offering (not Microsoft’s, as it happens, but Siemens’) over an ADSL network. Whereas Telenet’s was an old-fashioned DVB-style deployment over a digital cable network, using an only slightly less mature middleware solution, the Java-based MHP.

Given the relative circumstances of the two competitors, it’s rather tempting to suppose that the difference is in fact due to Belgacom encountering problems trying to scale up its IPTV network. Maybe that's a cue for all of us to start scaling down our IPTV forecasts.

'Telly-phones' - killer app or not?

Here's a bold statement: "Watching television on your mobile is a stupid idea. Nobody will do it for any length of time at any sustained cost." (From Monday's Guardian - Emily Bell again: sorry, Emily, nothing personal....)

Compare and contrast with the following observations:

1) "We expect Western Europe to ramp up to over one million [TV-capable cellphone] units sold this year." (From my websit'es report on Strategy Analytics' latest research, which predicts global sales of such devices this year will reach eight million).

2) South Korean telco SK Telecom's broadcast TV to cellphone service currently has around 400,000 subscribers, paying €11/month each. (Korea Times)

3) All commercial trials of mobile TV in Europe which have so far published results have shown that subscribers are willing to pay €10-15 a month to watch TV on their mobiles, and that in practice they do so for between 20 and 25 minutes a day. (See http://www.dvb-h-online.org/services.htm, and be prepared to do a lot of digging!).

I'm not saying that means the issue is conclusively settled. For instance, a significant amount of TV viewing to mobiles takes place in the home, a usage segment likely to be taken over by pay-TV operators once they get their networked home entertainment technology in place. Moreover, the revenues quoted may not be sufficient to make a business case.

But surely, on the evidence, no-one can argue there isn't some demand for these services, if only from bored commuters on long commutes, and that they'll be prepared to pay something for it on an ongoing basis.