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April 30, 2005
BBC gets creative with
The BBC Creative Archive project has launched under the banner of “Find it. Rip it. Mix it. Share it.” The project web site enthusiastically proclaims: “In other words, you can rip, mix and share the BBC.”
The Creative Archive is billed as a BBC led initiative to provide access to public service audio and video archives in a way that allows the British public to find, share, watch, listen and re-use the archive as a fuel for their own creative endeavours. Whether it will be enough to keep the kids amused remains to be seen.
The BBC will initially only be making available a hundred hours of material from natural history and factual programmes, although there is a commitment to add extracts from other genres in the future.
The initiative is based on the concept of creative commons, but it looks like the BBC lawyers have got involved. The licence is limited to use within the United Kingdom, which would technically appear to preclude publication on the World Wide Web, which could prove something of a limitation for this broadband initiative. The BBC also reserves the right to change the terms of the licence at any time.
Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, said: “The Creative Archive Licence provides a unique solution to one of the key challenges of rights in the digital age, allowing us to increase the public value of our archives by giving people the chance to use video and audio material for their own non-commercial purposes.”
The Creative Archive has also received the enthusiastic support of none less than former film producer Lord Puttnam.
Speaking at the launch of the project, Lord Puttnam said he needed no persuading that the Creative Archive was an idea whose time has come. He admitted to having survived a switchover from the world of the fountain pen to become very comfortable with the web, and revealed that he had downloaded hundreds of tracks for this iPod.
The key to capitalizing on the online opportunity, he suggested, lay in delivering compelling content that plays to the specific strengths of the online world.
While enormous energy was being devoted to protecting intellectual property rights online, he said, the obsessive focus on the threat has continued to blind many to the opportunity.
“The commercial music industry has already paid a high price for that,” he said. “The public sector cannot afford to make the same mistake.” At stake are not just revenues, but the chance to enhance and enrich the lives of citizens.
As a former film producer, Lord Puttnam said he believed in the sanctity of the creators’ rights, but had long been interested in exploring a generous regime for sharing access to archive material as a catalyst for creative collaboration and learning.
He said that when public resources have been used to create content, then the overwhelming objective should be to maximise the benefit of that content to the people who helped pay for its creation in the first place.
The availability of the equivalent of “clip art” for video would help teach creative skills and develop “media literacy” and actually help people understand the value of intellectual property.
Quoting Thomas Edison, an inventor that understood the value of protecting his intellectual property rights, he noted that Edison had originally seen the educational possibilities of moving pictures. “I had some glowing dreams about what the camera could be made to do and ought to do in teaching the world things it needed to know - teaching it in a more vivid, direct way,” Edison had said.
Lord Puttnam ended by adding that “The principles upon which the Creative Archive is based are fundamental to our future”. The opportunity is enormous, he said. “It requires energy, vision and imagination to seize it.”
Although the venture has invoked the support of Channel 4, the Open University and the British Film Institute, the BBC is clearly keen to maintain its association with the pilot project, which has its web site hosted as subdomain of the BBC web site.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 04:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 29, 2005
Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Confirm Network PVR Plans
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At the Banc of America Securities media conference in New York City last month, Time Warner Cable CEO, Glenn Britt, and Cablevision COO, Tom Rutledge, confirmed once again that their respective companies are planning to offer network PVR services later this year.
According to Britt, Time Warner Cable's service, which will be based on technology developed under the auspices of its now-defunct MystroTV project, and which will be offered under the brand, "Startover," will allow viewers to rewind the show they are currently watching to the beginning: it will not, however, allow viewers to then fast-forward through commercials, Britt said. Because of copyright concerns, Startover will only work for shows for which Time Warner Cable has received permission from programmers to offer on the service, he added. The service will initially be tested on the MSO's Columbia, South Carolina system.
Cablevision's service, Rutledge said, will allow subscribers to store recorded programming in assigned storage areas on central servers -- dubbed "condominiums" by the company--and to watch it whenever they choose. Britt told attendees that Time Warner Cable believes this approach could run into copyright problems, but Rutledge said that his company's legal team believes there should be no more violation of copyright involved than when consumers record programming onto a cable operator-owned DVR at the customer premises.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 05:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 28, 2005
Scientific Atlanta Grows From DVR Sales
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Much of the news in advertising and digital television revolves around the impact of the digital video recorder (DVR). Here is the financial report of just one (albeit a large one) manufacturer. Note that at the bottom of their quarterly statistics, SA added almost half as many DVR's as TiVo has total in non-DirectTV households!
Digital TV equipment provider, Scientific-Atlanta, has released financial results for its fiscal third quarter:
• Sales totaled $489.5 million, representing an increase of $52.5 million, or 12%, from the year-ago quarter, and an increase of $47.8 million, or 11%, from the preceding quarter.
The company attributed the year-over-year increase in subscriber product sales to "the mix shift toward higher-end digital set-top products and higher sales of cable modems, partially offset by lower selling prices for all set-top models."
• Gross margin was 36.9% of sales, flat with the year-ago quarter and down by 20 basis points from the preceding quarter. The company attributed the decrease to "the continued decline of average selling prices."
• Earnings totaled $61.7 million, or $0.40 per share, up $7.8 million, or 14%, from the year-ago quarter, and up $3 million, or 5%, from the preceding quarter.
At the end of the quarter, the company's cash reserves and short-term investments totaled $1.453 billion, up $137.2 million from the end of the preceding quarter. Cash provided by operating activities during the quarter totaled $148.6 million.
The company shipped 496,000 DVR's during the quarter, representing a 62% increase from the year-ago quarter, and an 11% increase from the preceding quarter. Slightly more than half of those shipments were of high-definition DVR's.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 06:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 26, 2005
Ad-skipping? How about content-skipping!
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Gotuit Media Corp. has developed a product, called "Gotuit On Demand," that combines segment metadata with VOD content. This is a fancy way of saying that viewers can use their remote control to quickly access the specific parts of an on-demand show that interest them.
Late last year, Gotuit announced that it had raised $10 million in 3rd round funding. Earlier in April they appointed cable and satellite industry veteran, Daniel O'Brien, as chairman and CEO. Mr. O'Brien has a long resume that includes entrepenurial and cable jobs.
"Dan O'Brien has one of the most impressive track records in the cable and satellite industry and has proven his ability to lead companies to achieve record-setting growth and success," Gotuit president, Mark Pascarella, said in a prepared statement. "With Dan's stature and respect in this market and extensive experience on both the operations and programming side of the business, he is the ideal person to help grow our business with our existing customers and create new opportunities as we look to extend our reach into new markets."
ReinventTV included this little news bit because it shows yet another aspect of video-on-demand (VOD). That is, the television program can be indexed and skipped through just like a DVD (provided Dan succeeds on his mission). Does this mean we might be skipping whole segments of the content as well as skipping the ads? Imaging having each segment on a news program indexed, we could probably get through the program in record time!
Posted by Martino Mingione at 07:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 25, 2005
Deloitte: TV Networks Are Dead
A major theme on this blog is that the digital media revolution changes many of the rules of business. Earlier, I sketched out a case that on-demand television advertising could grow as large as Internet advertising inside of 7 years. Read More >>
Right in sync with that, Deloitte and Touche has a new report that you can download here. Its conclusion: TV networks are threatened with extinction if they don't evolve quickly into something else.
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The model of a few dominant network channels funded by advertising is disappearing,the report concludes, though it also says networks can adapt by evolving into "a multi-dimensional, highly adaptable, customer-focused model."
What that means is extending the brand into areas including interactivity and on-demand offerings and new distribution channels like wired and wireless networks.
That suggestion mirrored one by a Magna Global study Wednesday that pointed to the increasing delivery of TV via peer-to-peer computer networks internationally and advised that distributors need to tap into that change rather than take a purely defensive stance against it through lawsuits and court challenges.
Broadcasters have countered that they need to find better ways to protect billions of dollars worth of digital content before they start launching their livelihoods into the digital stream.
The report's suggestions include:
Offer content across a variety of channels and platforms.
Re-package and market content as services as well as products.
Extend content lifespan by offering more digital content that can be easily packaged and sold or rented as DVD, VHS, memory cards, and wired and wireless electronic downloads.
That repackaging could take the form of:
On-demand - Warehousing audio and video for web-casts, radio, mobile phones, and Video-on-Demand.
Interactivity - Voting, purchasing, news, games, polls, comment/questions, and web-based chat.
Events - Tie-in events like the American Idol concert series.
In essence, the report is saying, start looking more like your broadband competition or risk being buried by it.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 24, 2005
InPhase Creates Holographic Storage
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One of the technology drivers behind the digital media revolution is plentiful disk space that is always getting faster and cheaper. Want more evidence of that? Look to a company called InPhase who demonstrated their Holographic Storage devices at the 2005 NAB (the television convention mecca).
I picked out some interesting quotes from an interview with InPhase's Liz Murphy in Broadcasing & Cable.
What exactly is a holographic drive?Posted by Martino Mingione at 02:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackIt has electronics, optical media and lasers like those used in other recording technology. And it also has a loader mechanism to feed the media into the drive. But what's different is a camera chip, which is used to record the data, and a spatial light modulator, which encodes the data.
So what's the big difference?
It has a lot of very high data density in a very small form factor. A 130-mm disk will hold 300 GB vs. a 120-mm DVD disk that holds roughly 5 GB.
What's the secret?
Other recording technologies write a bit at a time, but the modulator records pages of data, with each page holding 1.3 million bits in the form of pixels. And then we change the angle of the laser and write another page, and we can put hundreds of pages in the same location by doing that process.
And how cheap is it?
About one-fifth the price of videotape on a per-gigabyte basis, about 50¢ per gigabyte. And over time, that will fall to less than 20¢.
How quickly can you transfer data from a video server to the drive?
We're specing a 20-MBps transfer rate. By 2009 or 2010, we expect to be at 1.6 TB of data per disk with transfer rates of 120 MBps.
April 23, 2005
The Moxi Platform
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You might have heard about the Moxi Media Centers in connection with digital television. This Linux-based technology allows consumers to store, access and manage a variety of entertainment content – including digitally recorded TV programming, music, photos, games, and VOD titles through a single, unified menu. The platform is notable for its interface, which recently won an Emmy award, and which replaces the standard "spreadsheet" EPG interface with a so-called "cross-hairs" configuration consisting of two intersecting animated lines at right angles to each other.
Paul Allen’s products and services company, Digeo, licenses Moxi to other companies. Digeo claims that up to 5,000 Moxi Media Centers are now shipping each week. I am surprised at how low that number is given that another of Paul Allen’s companies is Charter Communications, the fourth largest cable company.
Anyways, Digeo had a few announcements at the NCTA show. I note that most of these announcements are about intentions or products that do not yet exist. I will leave it to you to determine their newsworthiness.
It said that Samsung and Digeo intend to enter into a deal to produce the next generation Moxi Media Center product family, the Moxi II, and that MSO's, Charter Communications and Adelphia, have agreed in principal to purchase the Samsung-built box,
It unveiled a new Moxi feature, dubbed "Moxi PC Link," which allows end-users to stream music and share photos from multiple PC's to TV sets throughout the home, using their existing wired or wireless home networks. The new feature is scheduled to debut in late 2005.
It unveiled a low-cost set-top box, dubbed the "Moxi Mini," which is slated for release next year.
It revealed that Comcast is planning a commercial trial deployment of Motorola's Moxi-based set-top, the Motorola Broadband Media Center with Moxi in its Huntsville, Alabama system.
It might be interesting if any Moxi-enabled consumers out there left some messages on this blog telling the rest of us what they think of the platform.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackEx-TVN Execs Launch VOD Content and Marketing Strategy Company
TVN Entertainment Corporation is one of the largest privately held digital content aggregation, management, distribution, and service companies. Originally created in 1988 to bring multi-channel Pay-Per-View (PPV) movie service to subscribers, TVN now delivers Video-On-Demand (VOD) to millions of viewers.
A new VOD content and marketing strategy company, dubbed the On Demand Media Group (ODMG), has been formed by two ex-executives of TVN Entertainment. They are Neil Goldberg (who was formerly TVN's SVP of programming) and Beverly Doughty (who was TVN's SVP of marketing).
"Major studios, cable operators, phone companies and others are all developing their on-demand and streaming media services," said Goldberg, in a statement. "While everyone understands the opportunity, very few of these organizations have the luxury of focusing solely on VOD, and that's where we come in."
The company says that its services are being used by VOD content aggregator, Hot Vision (which is targeting the European market), and by Broad Line Media (which will is developing an IPTV service, dubbed "Lassoo," that is scheduled to launch later this year). ODMG will target business with cable operators, as well as IPTV, mobile and wireless service providers.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 07:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 22, 2005
VOD Advertising
Earlier this week, an article entitled "Internet Ad Spending Creeping up on TV" appeared on ClickZ.
"Internet advertising revenue is growing at a faster clip than television advertising, which could slowly begin losing its global share of revenue in 2007, according to the latest ad spend predictions from ZenithOptimedia."
It also went on to say:
"TV is expected to gain 0.2 percent of share in 2006, while Internet will add 0.3 percent. The turning point for TV could come in 2007, when it is expected to lose 0.1 percent of share, while Internet spending gains by 0.3 percent."
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All of this is likely and I would not be surprised if the Internet actually gained more and television lost more than was sited in the report. The reason is simple enough: television is a mass medium whose effectiveness is diminishing each year while the Internet is a targeted medium whose growth is almost assured.
I am looking at a different story, however. one that is missed in the clinical statistics of the ZenithOptimedia report. It takes a little digging to see it coming.
Digital media is changing television dramatically and TV is in the process of breaking up into two distinct camps. I would expect that in the next few years we will be talking about the two as separate advertising mediums as well. In one: the traditional 30-second commercials that are inserted into linear network streams. This is what everyone visualizes when television advertising is mentioned today.
In the other camp, new non-linear inventories will be created by video on demand (VOD) and internet protocol television (IPTV). What is interesting is that, instead of being a mass medium like traditional television, it will have more of the characteristics of the highly targeted Internet. It would not surprise me to see VOD advertising grow from almost nothing today to $19 billion by the end of the decade. (read this analysis). Don’t believe me? Then read Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario in AdAge. Or Accenture's recent report predicting that ad-skipping on traditional television could cost linear television $27 billion over the next five years.
When this much money is at stake, well-positioned companies will rise up and capitalize on the opportunity. Some names are obvious: Comcast and Time Warner. Some large companies might join the list: SBC and Verizon. But many new ones will also emerge since the Internet itself will make that possible.
That means that it is possible a VOD advertising medium to pass up the Internet inside of 7 years. That is an idea that I find fascinating. It also is a story that should be rich in venture capital and new start ups. Basically, I am predicting another round of wild rides that is every bit as significant as the Internet story has been so far.
If you are interested in this topic, I will continue to post the news and opinions that will chronicle this change.
April 18, 2005
Verizon to offer new television experience
On the day that the chief executive of Verizon addressed a national convention of broadcasters, the phone company announced that it had signed its first deal with a television network in the run up to the launch of its new broadband video service, as William Cooper reports from Las Vegas.
Ivan Siedenberg, the chairman and chief executive of Verizon Communications opened the first day of the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention. It seemed significant that a telephone guy was addressing a broadcasting convention in a keynote speech, and it even seemed something of a surprise to the man who has worked his way to the top of the telephone industry in a career that began as a cable splicer’s assistant.
Verizon is planning to offer video services through an ambitious fibre optic-backed FiOS-TV internet protocol television service which it plans to launch later this year.
“For more than a decade,” he said, “we’ve been talking about ‘convergence’: the idea that what used to be separate domains – phone calls, photos, music, movies, games, video – would be united in a continuous stream of bits and bytes.” That day, it seems, has now arrived. “A new generation of technologies and a new generation of consumers have thrown all of our tidy definitions and old ideas into a giant multimedia Mixmaster to turn America into a broadband nation.”
“After many years of predictions and a couple of false starts along the way, these new broadband networks are launching us - once and for all - into the world of television and entertainment.”
The Verizon chairman said that the new fibre network would deliver data at up to 30Mb/s downstream and 5Mb/s upstream, with video at 100Mb/s downstream and up to 15Mb/s upstream.
“We’re signing deals with broadcasters, programmers, software and hardware companies to assemble a video package that will deliver the best possible customer experience,” he said.
He argued that the abundant bandwidth of fibre meant that the company was well positioned to deal with some of the issues that have faced cable companies, such as “must carry” and the retransmission of additional digital terrestrial channels.
He also appealed to the broadcasters present to support a “compelling competitive alternative to cable”. He later told reporters he was open to compensating broadcasters for their channels.
Following the conference keynote, Marilyn O’Connell, senior vice president for broadband solutions at Verizon, revealed that they had just signed their first deal with a broadcast network, NBC, and had other distribution deals with other providers, including Discovery and Starz Encore.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackVOD Advertising
Presently there is not all that much quality television content available to us from either cable video on demand (VOD) or internet protocol television (IPTV). It seems logical that over the next five years that this should change and we will have access to much more video content and be consuming our television differently.
Here is a question that I would really like to hear everyone opinion: how will we pay for it? There are only two realistic approaches – we either pay subscription fees that underwrite the production and delivery of what we want to see or we can let the advertisers pay the freight. Or some combination thereof.
But let’s start off with a little reality check. In 2003 the Viacom station group (Viacom owns CBS) received about $1.8 billion in advertising revenue. If every household paid that amount of money directly in fees proportional to CBS’s television ratings, Viacom household might pay $180 per year for just their content. I suppose that we would repeat that again for NBC, and again for ABC, and ESPN, etc.
So I ask again, if we had a chance, what would we tell Comcast and Time Warner Cable and SBC and Verizon about how we are willing to pay for it? Here are a few ideas:
No Advertising, that is, we will pay some subscription fee to access only what we want. Although many permutations are possible, I suppose that we might not expect the average household to pay more than today’s current monthly cable fees for everything. Cable at least gives us 150 channels of nebulous content for that money. If we got our television on demand, we better get access to at least that much stuff.
Sponsorship Advertising. How about this idea; after I pick the program that I want to watch, Comcast or SBC makes me watch up to 4 minutes of commercials and then I can watch my television show on demand and ad free. (note: if we remained consistent to today’s commercial programs, I would possibly watch 18 minutes of ads for every 42 minutes of show).
VOD Equivalent of the Status Quo. How about this: give me access to the program, Comcast and SBC can stick ads inside the program at the traditional commercial breaks and give some of that revenue to the producers of the show and leave me out of it.
A Television Version of the Internet’s Point and Click. Watch a program, see something of interest, click on it, show pauses, shifts to video of item of interest, and so on. This way, a viewer sees ads only if he/she likes what an actor is wearing, driving, eating, etc. Basically, the click through to the item of interest makes the advertiser pay the cost of television, but I only see what interests me similarly like the Internet today. I suppose that there might be some equivalent of Google’s AdWords in this mix.
Perhaps you have another idea not listed above? Please give any reply that you think reflects your thoughts. You never know, we just might influence how the new media companies will build on-demand television.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 01:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 17, 2005
Product Placement Gaffs on The Apprentice
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There are reasons why branded entertainment is not the answer to the marketer’s dilemma of what to do with television advertising’s diminished effectiveness. Steve Hall at AdRants has much more amusing examples about the limitations of product placement branded entertainment. In a future article I will try to give the boring reasons but Steve’s blog is just too amusing to miss. In it, he points out two gaffs on The Apprentice – the premier branded entertainment show today, garnering about $5 million per episode.
The first involves the Domino’s Pizza episode.
“Domino's was put in an awkward position in last week's episode in which The Apprentice contestants both made meatball pizza which were rejected by Domino's only to have Papa John's Pizza capitalize on that rejection by placing a meatball pizza ad in 60 markets, ultimately, making Domino's look pretty dumb.”
The second involves the American Eagle episode.
“Last night, American Eagle, for which the contestants design ridiculously impractical "Wearable technology clothing" and failed miserably, was slighted immediately following the task by the reward - a shopping spree at, as Trump called it, ‘one of the great stores anywhere in the world,’ Bergdorf Goodman. Not paying sponsor American Eagle. Bergdorf Goodman.”
I make fun of this stuff because many marketers believe that the best antidote to video on demand (VOD) and digital video recorders (DVR) ad-skipping is simply to imbed the ad into the program. Doubtful.
But even if effective, there is no way for product placement to absorb all the value for media companies of 30-second commercials. The advertising market for television commercials was $56 billion last year. The television portion of branded entertainment was maybe $1.8 billion. Even if the gaffs on The Apprentice never occurred, product placement (damn, I mean) branded entertainment can never absorb all that inventory without making TV even more ineffective.
Tandberg to Provide TV-over-DSL System
In a March 16th filing with the Oslo stock exchange, Tandberg Television revealed that it has received an order, valued in excess of 4 million Euros, for a TV-over-DSL system from what the company described as a "leading European telco."
In an email to ITVT, the company said that it was "not in a position to name the new customer at this stage, but hope that we will be able to in the near future."
The service is scheduled to go live this summer. The contract is for an MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264/AVC) video headend: Tandberg says that it will deploy its EN5930 encoding system (note: the EN5930 is Tandberg's standard definition MPEG-4 AVC encoding system, which the company claims provides low bit-rate encoding of up to 50% less than MPEG-2) to support ingest and delivery of MPEG-4 AVC video, as well as enable MPEG-2 encoding.
April 16, 2005
Targeted Advertising
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Someday, ads will find their way into (or around) video on demand (VOD) or internet protocol television (IPTV) or digital video recorders (DVR). These non-linear television vehicles are also equipped to provide targeted advertising. One question is this: will advertisers use the context of the video to guess at who is watching or will it be necessary to use a demographic profile of the viewer to determine which ad is relevant?
An article entitled ‘Media Buyers Detect Network Branding Effect, Say It's Influencing Demos’ points out that a network can influence which demographic tunes into a program. Its case in point is the show Everybody Loves Raymond. Apparently, there is a 10-year age gap between those who watch the show on CBS versus those that watch the exact same show when it appears on TBS. It is speculated that how each network markets itself has a lot to do with which demographic tunes in.
I think that this is another piece of evidence to indicate the value of using a demographic profile to determine ad relevance rather than relying on Nielsen ratings or some equivalent.
This is an idea that transcends VOD, IPTV, or the DVR. In fact, even for digital cable today it would not surprise me if Comcast and Time Warner Cable started selling commercials to the set top box instead of to the show. In that way, no matter what each viewer’s tastes are or what mood they are in that night, the targeted message would still be shown.
This type of demographic targeting has one other huge advantage that media buyers should covet: the second part of ‘reach and frequency.’ If the buyer wants a specific frequency number (which they do), then it will be easy to tell an ad to air a maximum of 5 times at each set top box (for example). Obviously, the media provider’s interest in do this is that the ad campaign should command a higher premium.
In future articles I will explore the strategies and legality of combining television advertising with demographic profiling. However, for purposes of this posting, I think that when VOD advertising begins to take shape, demographic databases will be a part of that solution.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 02:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 15, 2005
Microsoft TV IPTV Edition Wins IEEE Spectrum ACE Award
Microsoft TV IPTV Edition platform has won the First Annual IEEE Spectrum ACE Award for Emerging Technology. IEEE Spectrum is the in-house publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the award represents the result of a vote by the latter's membership.
According to Microsoft, IPTV Edition won the award because of "its potential to provide the greatest financial return from broad commercial application."
The company accepted the award March 9th at a lunch ceremony in San Francisco. To date, IPTV Edition has been chosen by a major US telco, SBC, to support commercial roll-outs of video services expected to begin later this year, and is currently being trialed by several other telcos around the world, including Bell Canada, BellSouth, Reliance Infocomm, Swisscom and Telecom Italia (note: another major US telco, Verizon, plans to deploy a Microsoft TV solution that supports both IP and Cable QAM infrastructure).
Microsoft TV also recently entered a global collaboration agreement for IPTV with French telecommunications equipment giant, Alcatel, whose Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexers (DSLAM) and other broadband and triple-play technologies are widely deployed around the world. The deal calls for the companies to integrate Microsoft's IPTV Edition software platform to provide a joint solution that the companies claim will reduce deployment costs and shorten time-to-market.
Verizon in an agreement with Starz
Verizon has signed a content deal with Starz Entertainment Group as well as content providers represinting roughly 100 television channels.
Under the agreement with Liberty Media Corporation, Verizon can cary Starz' 13 movie channels onthe phone company's IPTV service due out later this year.
Read Full Wall Street Journal Story >>
Read about Verizon and NBC >>
Former AOL chief predicts transformation of television
Interactive television may finally flourish amid the long-promised convergence of communications technologies, says Barry Schuler, the former chief executive of AOL. Barry Schuler writes on “What’s holding back interactive TV?” in a special feature entitled ME TV on news.com.
He says “new forces in motion may finally transform TV forever”. He points out that unmentionable “C word” convergence is finally happening, as previously separate networks for telephone, cable television and the internet begin to merge. This, he says, “will set the stage for the biggest changes we have seen in TV yet”.
He concludes: “We are on the precipice of a nuclear battle for the hearts and minds of the very couch potatoes who, up until now, have not been very interested in anything that complicates the TV ‘zone out’ time.”
He goes on to make some valid points about TiVo and other attempts to change television.
The innovators' biggest mistake is to overestimate the desire to engage with new technology and underestimate how difficult it is to change consumer habits. This is a point worth remembering as advocates of DVRs, VOD, and IPTV think that everything must change and soon. Experience teachs us that consumers shift their habits slowly and only when there is a significant advantage in doing so. And the new technology must be mind-numbingly simple to use.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 05:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 14, 2005
Strategies to Entice Viewers to Watch Live TV , not on DVR
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There really is no limit to the ways one can rationalize a topic when facing an ugly reality. Take for instance an article in today's Wall Street Journal entitled Networks Take On the Time Machine. Its general premise is that some networks are working to give scheduled programs the sheen of a live sports event or one-time-only spectacular to compel viewers to watch in real time rather than recording them for later viewing.
Executive really don't get it if they think ideas like this might work. My favorite quote from the article is:
"As May approaches, so does some of the networks' most-compelling content: cliffhanger plots, shocking story turns, and season and series finales. Among potential highlights are this season's last, tension-filled episodes of "24" on News Corp.'s Fox; the series finale of "Everybody Loves Raymond" on Viacom's CBS; and the potential for enigma-solving on "Lost" on Walt Disney's ABC. If there is a place to take a stand against ad-skipping, this is it."
The DVR allows a viewer to 'time shift' a show and watch it at his/her own convenience. That really is the main point of the device -- even over ad-skipping. Ironically, on my DVR the only show that we faithfully record and refuse to watch all season is Fox's 24. The reason is that we love it.
A season ago my wife commented that she hated watching an episode only to wait another week to see how Jack Bower was going to get out of this week's pickle. Additionally, we also don't like to watch the ads. Our solution was simple, record all 24 episdodes before even watching this season!
No amount of hype is going to make us want to watch the ads. Likewise, no impending sense of urgency is going to make us start watching even the first episode of this season's 24 before we know that we have them all recorded. Then, over a week or two (probably by summer) we will watch the whole season at one time. Not only is it convenient, but we get back roughly 432 minutes of our life, too. (That is, skipping 18 minutes of commercials per episode over 24 episodes).
And this is the real problem that networks face. I have the control over my viewing patterns and they don't.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 08:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 13, 2005
In Game Advertising
I notice two articles that have come out in recents days. In the first, a company called Massive is building an ad network for in-game advertising. They are still testing the technology but announced that 12 major advertisers have signed up. In the second article, a company called IGN has a sales staff that can assist game publishers in selling in-game ads.
There must be a show or convention going on. An what do you know, there is! The first ever in-game advertising opportunities convention in New York City. I will have to wander over there Thursday and see what's up. I will write in this blog on the weekend to tell what is happening.
p.s., for those of you who are wondering what this has to do with television. Simple, the younger audience (especially males) has been steadily leaving traditional television. I personally think that the way to reach them in the near future is in the IPTV and VOD ad markets. But what do you know, there is none! So, I guess in-game advertising is what the current experiment is since there is no alternative.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 07, 2005
Video on Demand vs. High Definition Television
I was scanning an article in Broadcasting & Cable today called "A Guide to High-Def Highs." (sorry, subscription needed). While interesting for the topic it focused on (which networks are putting out worthwhile shows in HD), I found most interesting the following:
It is starting to get crowded at the HD Inn. Regional sports networks are getting into the game, and some cable network,like ESPN, are even launching second HD networks. The bad news facing all of them: getting carriage. Cable bandwidth is still limited, and VOD services are competing for any available space.
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Yes, there is only so much bandwidth to go around. And I have not heard from anyone I know inside the cable companies that there is any immenent problem. And there are other ideas being explored that also would require some of that bandwidth: ideas like Visible World's or Invidi's targeted advertising to the set top box.
In an environment like that would HD really rise to the top priority on the cable MSO's list? I doubt it. If bandwidth started to get scare, would there be another round of capital upgrades in the future at Comcast and Time Warner? I don't know, but for people looking for investment opportunities in companies that might benefit, it warrants keeping an eye on future developments.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 05, 2005
Mexico's Cablevisión Deploys v1.7 of Microsoft TV's Foundation Edition
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On March 8th, Mexican cable operator, Cablevisión (note: the latter is not related to the US MSO of virtually the same name; it is a subsidiary of Mexico's Grupo Televisa), began commercial deployment of Version 1.7 of Microsoft TV's Foundation Edition platform in Mexico City.
According to Microsoft, the new software is running on Motorola's DCT6412 HD DVR and will allow the operator, which deployed an earlier version of Foundation Edition in 2003, to offer dual-tuner PVR service, HDTV, VOD, an EPG and ITV games to its entire digital subscriber base.
"This deployment is a great milestone for the cable industry in Latin America as it is the first of its kind to convert a cable operator's entire digital customer base to advanced digital services," Tim Fritzley, Microsoft TV's VP of global sales and solutions, said in a prepared statement.
"With these great new services, Cablevisión's customers will enjoy the ultimate control of advanced TV experiences in their home. They can record their favorite programs, including programs in HD, pause and rewind live television broadcasts at the touch of a button, and build a customized list of recordings by using the DVR's series recording capability to record their favorite shows. Cablevisión will not only be the leader in Mexico but also one of the leaders in North America."Posted by Martino Mingione at 05:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Atlas Interactive to Use BitBand VOD Tech for Indian Deployment
Israel-based IPTV technology provider, BitBand, says that Atlas Group-subsidiary, Atlas Interactive, has chosen its VOD technologies for a large-scale deployment of IPTV on the networks of an undisclosed Indian incumbent telco and in various Indian hotels.
In the first phase of the 200-million-Euro project, dubbed netTV, service will be rolled out to over 50,000 customers in the New Delhi region. The second phase of the project will take place later this year, with a roll-out in 38 major cities, including Bombay: it is expected to extend the service to millions of potential customers. Atlas, which is using BitBand's Maestro content distribution and server management suite and its Vision servers, says that it chose to use the BitBand products because of their scalability.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackNDS Unveils ITV-Enabled "End-to-End" DVB-H Solution
News Corp. subsidiary, NDS, has launched what it describes as an
"end-to-end" DVB-H solution for mobile TV broadcasting.
The company says that the solution is a fully standardized DVB-H system, based on an extended version of its mVideoGuard technology, with the ability to protect continuous broadcast video and audio content streams to mobile devices. It claims that it will support any device that is compliant with the DVB-H standard, allowing operators to trial and launch mobile TV service on multiple devices, including two-way devices such as TV-enabled mobile phones and one-way devices for use in automobiles. The solution integrates DVB-H both at the headend and with device clients for multiple operating systems. In addition to enabling transmission and protection of continuous broadcast streams, NDS says, the solution will provide an interactive infrastructure that will allow such ITV applications as voting, chat, shopping and EPG's.
"It is critical to support DVB-H in this time of growth for mobile communication and we have successfully developed a solution that meets standards and pushes the boundaries of how the mobile phone is used as a communication device," Joseph Deutsch, NDS's director of business development for mobile solutions, said in a prepared statement.
NDS demo'd the solution at the recent CTIA show in New Orleans, and says that it is now ready for trial deployments.
BigBand, NDS Integrate DSG Technologies
BigBand Networks, a company that offers various network platforms for video, voice and data services, and a News Corp. subsidiary, NDS, say that they have successfully integrated their "advanced mode" DOCSIS Set-top Gateway (DSG) technologies.
At the [2005] CableLabs winter conference earlier this month, the companies demonstrated video provided by the BigBand Broadband Multimedia-service Router (BMR) with service control signaling on the BigBand Cuda Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS), interfacing to NDS's hybrid IP and MPEG-2 digital video set-top box system: a Quanta Network Systems (QNS) set-top box running NDS's MediaHighway middleware and the company's VideoGuard conditional access technology used an integrated cable modem to exchange program, network and service management information with the BigBand Cuda CMTS via DOCSIS signaling. The programs themselves were delivered to the set-top from the BigBand BMR via MPEG-2 video. The DSG specification covers messaging transport between the headend and customer premises equipment, including OpenCable devices and residential gateways. The devices at the customer premises can combine both digital set-top and cable modem capabilities.
According to BigBand, utilizing the cable modem for technical communications with a DSG-qualified CMTS such as the BigBand Cuda achieves better scalability and economics than legacy out-of-band messaging methods. DSG is intended to integrate video services within cable's increasingly IP-based management and transport infrastructure.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 04:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackIPTV and Advertising
Yesterday, I drove up to the NCTA in San Francisco to see how vendors are positioning themselves in television this year. As you might expect, IPTV-oriented companies are better represented. I also noted that the larger VOD systems providers are articulating their products better.
What particularly struck me was the lack of understanding of how advertising was going to play into the mix. I honestly don’t think the telecoms have even thought about this.
Today's linear television advertising market in the United States is $56 billion dollars. That is the money advertisers spent buying commercials on broadcast, cable networks, local television stations, and local cable in 2004. This huge pot of gold sustains many businesses in the television food chain – including those companies that create the television shows that (hopefully) viewers tune in to see.
In order to make that ad market work, there are very specific systems and institutions in place. For instance, there are agency planning tools, buyer-side proposal systems, ratings providers, rep firms, media sales automation tools, inventory analysis, national sales offices, traffic & billing applications, spot distribution, etc.
I have yet to find anyone in the IPTV marketplace that is aware of these requirements. In the VOD system providers, there is a little more awareness that these systems and institutions exist, but no planning of how to integrate to them. If I had to guess, it appears that each company is so busy trying to justify the core value of their technologies that advertising is defined as a requirement outside their system and one that the advertisers somehow will deal with.
My question is this: if the telecoms actually succeed in the television business, how are they going to integrate television advertisers into the mix? Telecom subscription based business models cannot cover the whole of television. In other words, the HBO and Showtime business model will not work for Animal Planet or the History Channel. If those fees were bundled into the telecom monthly subscription fee, there would still be a huge hole in the business model. Also, that high a monthly fee will make the offering non-competitive against cable.
The amount of potential money that can be earned from advertising is not trivial. Indeed, I would have thought that the geniuses in IPTV would have already pieced together that this revenue stream is the eventual golden egg that justifies the billions of dollars in capital upgrades and expenditures that telecoms like SBC are making.
A note: I will remind myself to write future articles about what telecoms might do to both (a) take advantage of their medium (that is, offer newer strategies of advertising that can only work on IPTV) and (b) sell that value proposition to the agencies that spend the real advertising dollars on behalf of their clients.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackComcast's Casts Some Light on its VOD Plans
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Comcast's VP of VOD content development and management, Matt Strauss, provided some insight into the current usage of video on demand. He also gave hints about Comcast's future plans for its Comcast On Demand VOD offering.
Strauss said that Comcast's VOD service was used 70 million times last month, and that in the MSO's home market of Philadelphia it was accessed by 60% of the company's digital customers.
In what might be interpreted as evidence that VOD has the potential to balkanize the TV audience, the niche content offered on Comcast's VOD service by the Select On Demand division that Strauss heads up, last month attracted more viewers than VOD offerings from basic cable channels, he said.
Comcast next month plans to launch a real-estate VOD service that will provide viewers with video tours of homes for sale, and that it plans to allow users of its Dating on Demand service to upload content (i.e. profiles of themselves) via Webcam. Further down the road, he said, the company plans to add VOD auctions and job-finding services, and perhaps even personal video content modeled after 'blogs.
He also said that he believes the increasing popularity of VOD will lead to an acceleration in the development of non-traditional advertising methods, including national and local on-demand long-format advertising, and advertising that counteracts the fast-forward button, such as product placement and pop-up overlays.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 07:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 04, 2005
The SBC Money Trail
I love following a money trail. In the case of capital expenditures, this excercise can tell us if a company has significant and sustainable revenues or not. In SBC Communications's case, the money trail tells us unambiguously that they are serious about competing against cable television with ipTV.
Late last year, SBC announced that it was going to invest up to $5 billion over five years in building an IPTV infrastructure called project Lightspeed. The service will be marketed under the brand "U-verse," and which will be offered over project Lightspeed's fiber-to-the-premises and fiber-to-the-neighborhood network
It was a significant milestone (even if only psychological) to many people. After that announcement, I started receiving phone calls from venture capitals interested in knowing everything they could find out about the 'space.' If you want to read why Ed Whitacre wants to do this, click here.)
It is easier to say that one intends to spend a pile of money; it is more difficult to actually back that up. Immediately, SBC announced a $400 million, 10 year deal with Microsoft for their IPTV platform. Today I read that SBC Communications awarded a $195 million contract to Scientific-Atlanta to provide video equipment for its Project Lightspeed initiative.
SBC has also put five veteran TV executives into that initiative specifically for video content.
This looks pretty serious to me. I wonder when they are going to put in place the people and structure to sell ads on all this future inventory. You just know that that cannot be too far behind.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 07:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 03, 2005
Seachange International vs. Open Architecture
Seachange International (trading symbol: SEAC) has been a successful company for many years. Their dominance began when cable television MSO's converted to digital ad inserters in the late 1990's. Seachange out-marketed and out-smarted everyone, ending up with 80% of that market. nCube (now owned by C-COR) has the other 20%. Seachange, nCube, and Concurrent naturally focused on selling VOD servers after the ad inserter market was saturated.
I have been told that C-COR has placed its recently acquired nCube assets under a software division (still headed up by Michael Pohl, nCube's CEO). If true, that would mark an interesting business development milestone. Namely, that the new owner of the second largest proprietary server vendor sees value in the asset that has nothing to do with proprietary servers. They can exit that server market because it goes against technology trends, focusing instead on the software that manages the server.
Many people believe that off-the-shelf server hardware is now sufficient for delivering video-on-demand streams. And they certainly are much cheaper to incorporate. CCOR's moves may be validation of that direction since their real goal rests on the future of IPTV. And Seachange continues to believe that proprietary is good.
These are signs that anyone holding SEAC stock might want to sell it.
Posted by Martino Mingione at 07:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackTiVo Trials New "Pop-Up" Advertising Technology
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TiVo has begun testing a new advertising technology, designed to counteract the ad-skipping that its service allows. The technology, which is initially being tested on a small number of deployed Series2 boxes, displays half-second, pop-up, quarter-screen banner ads whenever viewers fast-forward through commercial breaks: if interested in the product or service advertised by one of the banners, viewers can press the thumbs-up button on their TiVo remotes to access an area that provides more information.
When it announced earlier this month that it had secured a deployment deal with Comcast, TiVo stated that the deal would make its platform's enhanced advertising features "widely available" to Comcast customers.
Personally, I think that TiVo's most innovative solution for advertisers are their 'telescopic' ads that creatively mix content with advertising and take advantage of the DVR platform. However, for that strategy to be highly effective, a much larger number of households must be targeted. Something more like Comcast and Time Warner Cable's base added together?
Posted by Martino Mingione at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
