Blackarrow Consulting at IBC2011

Written by Ian Nock on September 9, 2011 — Leave a Comment

IBC has rolled round again and we will be enjoying the delights of the RAI – hot dogs and Coke Lite that are almost as expensive as Inkjet Printer Ink (that is the most expensive thing by volume on the planet I understand) – for the 14th year in a row, over the coming days starting today – 9th September and going through to the end. As for many it will be a hard work expo with quite a bit of networking with the aim of not expiring under the green bottles, and hitting those 9am and 10am meetings feeling refreshed (and not damp under rain). The weather forecast is mixed from warm days to rainy days… Amsterdam is always a little different.

The word on the street is that we will see ‘Cloud’ everywhere, whether it is content delivery or production, and quite a number of hybrid broadcast/IPTV and OTT solutions. We shall see really what that brings, and whether there is good business, poor business or pure hype.

If you want to meet up at all then feel free to tweet me at @iannock, and follow me there as I tweet the occasional on-the-spot experience from the show.

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Content Protection in an Unmanaged World

Written by Ian Nock on July 7, 2011 — Leave a Comment

Sometimes I see an article that has so spot on a set of messages, that you just have to draw attention to it…

Andrew Glasspool, Founder and Managing Partner at the business and technology consultancy firm Farncombe. “There is the potential for a train smash when Connected TV has become mass-market and you try to put really high value premium content on devices that are 2-3 years old,”

via Videonet – News and Analysis – Connected TV protection: heading for a train smash.

This is more than Connected TV in my view, as the article does say, this is about making available high value video and other content on any CE device, from Connected TV down to the simplest mobile phone. How do you keep it going? I believe device blacklisting is going to become much more prevalent, and very noticeable to the general public. Not just a train smash, more someone taking the line and bridge away under the train.

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Mobile TV – Get Over It

Written by Ian Nock on March 30, 2011 — 4 Comments

I have written multiple times about Mobile TV through its death throws and there is news of yet another operator dropping the service.

In yet another blow to mobile TV using the DVB-H standard, Dutch operator KPN has decided to pull the plug out of its DVB-H Mobiel TV service from June, 1. KPN will use the freed up capacity for improvements to its Digitenne DTT platform.

via KPN terminates DVB-H mobile TV | Broadband TV News.

My previous posts have focused a lot on the why behind Mobile TV, as in when you are away from your home is the mainstream audience really interested in watching TV shows. My conclusion has been that no, there is no real interest in watching TV on the go for the mainstream audience. There is a minority audience who have the ability to focus on video for more than a few minutes, and those are commuters stuck on trains or buses. However even then, many of their journeys are broken up and not regular in start and end to work with scheduled transmissions. This kills mobile TV. Where there is an avenue of growth is through on-demand, but this is simply not available to many as the networks are too intermittent for this sort of service and mobile video that is popular is the download at home and take with you kind – iTunes in other words. Even then, it is still not mass market in the same way that audio playback is popular, because audio does not have to stop when you get off the train and is perfectly available to the drivers amongst us.

So the question I have to ask is – why are operators persisting in this? Why do they keep coming back even though the customers are not their? When will they Get Over It and concentrate on something that customers care about?

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Product lessons by Steve Jobs

Written by Ian Nock on March 16, 2011 — 1 Comment

I am a functional kind of guy – the product has to do fantastic things and I am less concerned about how it looks. It does still have to look reasonable though. This post I found on Business Insider tells us that we have to look beyond our current product set and take a view that a great customer experience is more important than function… to an extent.

Research in Motion thought the iPhone would bomb, basically, because its not a BlackBerry.

via Research in Motion: Executives Thought The iPhone Was “Badly Flawed,” And Assumed It Would Bomb.

However I don’t go fully for the form over function argument. The iPhone did a great number of things very well compared to its competition whilst being a passable phone and the article does touch on these. Even today, the iPhone has the edge, in my book, over Android with respect to web browsing. One area though it really shines – Music and Podcasts. No other phone has the level of integration from store to content to device that the Apple iPhone has and I am missing that in my new Android phone. However Google has a stratospheric development cycle from having so many different partners on hardware and software, so I hope that will be resolved soon.

A great lesson for product developers – Passable to good function, and great form. Oh, and don’t rest on your laurels.

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Content Security Troubles for Connected TV

Written by Ian Nock on February 1, 2011 — Leave a Comment

It is the elephant in the room when it comes to OTT – Can the content owner be sure that they get paid for their content? Boxee and Netflix are working to resolve Boxee’s specific issues.

We’re in a bit of an awkward spot at the moment.The Netflix app is up and running on Boxee we watched the intro to Full Metal Jacket earlier today, but we have not yet satisfied Netflix’s security requirements. We anticipate availability soon.  It’s terrible to be so close to releasing and yet still be waiting on one thing to fall into place.

via Boxee Blog » Netflix Update.

However this is a wider issue that was faced in the old traditional TV arena with the introduction of content protection (CGMS-A/Macrovision and, to a more limited extent in the old world, DRM) alongside the imperative of conditional access. In the traditional PayTV arena, the issue could be solved as there was generally a single platform with a single (or double) set of technologies that could be controlled by having managed hardware at the consumer end.

Today however, the TV companies (new OTT and old traditional Cable/Satellite) are facing the fact that the content they will be producing will be seen by customers on many different platforms, at least the customer wants to see it on all their platforms, most of which are completely outside of the control of the operator. There is not just the issue of whether a customer can watch it on platform A, and copy it to watch on platform B – there is the Connected TV issue that content can be watched on platform A only in location X and can pay a little extra to watch it in location Y on platform B. This is a complexity that is being drawn not only because content owners are living a little in the past, but that content distributors are living a little too much in the future and hoping for really profitable business models that layer incremental revenue onto just getting the content to the customer.

This is a huge software development and security tools headache, to ensure that none of the many platforms have a flaw that allows wholesale copying or use of the content in a way that is against the wishes of the content owner. After usability and getting the content, this is the biggest technical issue in my view.

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Forgotten Viewers

Written by Ian Nock on January 28, 2011 — Leave a Comment

With all this talk about 2nd screen and using tablets to access video services, it struck me that in all the headline discussion the biggest viewer population is being ignored for watching content when out and about. This population are all those who have those old and boring laptops and netbooks :-) . It seems as I speak to my friends and neighbours (not all of my friends are deeply technical), that they all have laptops and or netbooks but have not really got into accessing their TV content through them in their own homes, or outside the home. Except if you include YouTube that is.

They have not been completely forgotten, in that in the US pretty much all OTT video sites allow you to view the video with a PC. There is no blocking here like with Google TV.

However their experience has been left behind the new developments that are coming in the various tablet applications. Not for the PC do we have lovely exciting UIs with app-like features that give them access to the EPG, remote recording and PVR access. No, mostly they are given simple UIs based around simple web pages that would not look out of place five years ago. So where is the rich media experience and functionality for the most popular second screen?

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Operators Moving on 2nd Screen Infrastructure

Written by Ian Nock on January 27, 2011 — Leave a Comment

I blogged previously about the rise of Tablets and how important they are to  the TV industry’s plans, and now I note the confirmed news as follows:

News Corp.‘s BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) confirmed it has bought UK WiFi network The Cloud from its investor, DFJ Esprit, “to allow easy access to Sky content on multiple devices in and out of home”.

via The Cloud Will Underpin Booming Sky’s Outdoor Viewing | paidContent.

In combination with the news that Virgin Media also in the UK are deploying WiFi as well, this is pointing to the fact that operators are not going to leave it to chance whether their customers can use second screen devices to access content from outside the home. Does this also point to a lack of trust in 3G operators ability to deliver as well? Particularly with the drive downwards on bandwidth caps with operators like T-Mobile? I think it does, but I just wonder how popular it will be to do this on the move considering the way people live day to day.

Certainly the drive to TV everywhere is on the rise.

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CES sinks in

Written by Ian Nock on January 27, 2011 — Leave a Comment

It has been some weeks since CES closed and we can now see what the big push of CES has been. No big surprises but it was Tablets and 3D.

Now 3D was a big drive from last year as well and it has made regular appearances at other conferences and exhibitions focused at the broadcast industry. This year though you can see (and many reporters and industry pundits have seen as well) that the pressure on pushing 3D is higher than ever. The key problem though is that consumer interest has not followed this and the industry has come across as being increasingly desperate to flog 3D to the masses and the masses are not really biting. There are many reasons for this as I have blogged previously about but the main one is that the costs exceeds the benefit. Most content just does not benefit from 3D and customers see that. We will see how the year ends at next year’s CES, and see if this plays out as a major fail as I expect.

Tablets are the other interest, with a major push by many manufacturers to take the Apple iPad mantle. This will make a very dynamic market during the coming year as Android (the choice de jour) devices eat into the almost total market control that Apple have… and there will be a reduction in the share by Apple just purely through pressure of numbers. However time will tell if any of the new devices will be a major challenger on its own against the iPad, or if we will have the expected 70/30 split with a lot of different devices playing in the 30% against the market domination of the iPad’s 70%.

What this means to the TV industry? I believe that they will focus still on Apple devices for their second screen solutions with only the biggest pushing out secondary releases almost certainly on the Android platform. Sorry HP and RIM, you are also-rans despite how good your devices may be. This is an issue of scale. This is the takeaway from CES for the TV industry – second screen is going to be huge this year and anyone who does not offer a product based on Apple iPad and Android is going to be behind the curve. I cannot wait for some neat solutions, particularly those that offer access to my content wherever I am. I do hope they solve the content rights issues :-) .

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Second Screen – TiVo Premier app for iPad

Written by Ian Nock on November 24, 2010 — Leave a Comment

Well this certainly looks great…

YouTube – Sneak Peek: TiVo Premiere app for iPad.

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Mobile TV–the end, long live Mobile TV

Written by Ian Nock on October 6, 2010 — 1 Comment

I have written before about how Mobile TV just is not a good customer proposition, and now we have the market decision in the US that Qualcomm is shutting down FLO TV that followed the much earlier UK decision, albeit 3 years later. The crux of the matter is that the mobile customer is not actually interested in TV, they are interested in short form video content and, much more importantly, audio content. This can be reasoned to be when you are a mobile customer, you are actually passing into or out of reception (a killer for live TV or even audio), and not always interested in content that requires you to watch because normally you need to be watching what is going on because you need to control where you are going to… whether you are a pedestrian, passenger or driver.

I am sure also that the bandwidth availability is also coming into play, making the place and timeshift the normality rather than purely taking live content as the old transistor radio was able to. The amount of bandwidth available in high density population areas also does not suit the broadcast model, particularly in the iPhone centric, AT&T broken mobile network that is struggling to provide the interactive access demanded by customers.

All in all, this has to be death of mobile TV, the continuing life of mobile audio through place and time shifting, and the need to focus on trying to give customers interactive access to information websites. The other point to make is the only mobile content that people desire is either free or one off costs – not the regular subscription model.

At least this is my view, what is yours?

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