HOUSTON – This year’s SCTE Emerging Technologies Conference held last week in Houston, was far more “marketing” oriented than Engineering.
The Thursday session themes continued around consumer consumption of any content, anywhere, any time on any device and the growing demand for “personalization” of TV. The YouTube and MySpace.com generation mandates “personalization” and sharing of content and cable engineers have to learn to adapt.
Some of the changes illustrated in data are: Twenty million Americans aged 12+ have downloaded a full-length movie within the last month, according to Solutions Research Group, and 80% of total movie “downloaders” only use peer-to-peer file-sharing sites. One million videos were downloaded from iTunes to the video iPod in its first 20 days and YouTube generation uplinks or views 100 million video clips per day. It’s not about a TV or TV viewing anymore (although TV viewership has yet to be significantly eroded), it’s about Xboxes, iTunes, picture capable cell phones, PVRs, DVD players, media centers/players and so on.
Speakers during the opening session called My Videos, Your Videos, Our Videos from multimedia technology companies Cox, Time Warner, SeaChange, Buzztime, Motorola and Cisco described how the future of television is evolving in this direction and how the technologies need to involve for supporting this trend.
Their contention is that research shows Internet diversions are outpacing TV for pure entertainment value. Consumers of this new media environment want seamless delivery and consumption of content. They want help in accessing “long tail” (niche) content. They want services that enable video to be consumed any time any place. They wish to be connected to their community and they don’t mind advertisements if they are interesting and pertinent to themselves and their life styles.
Targeted and personalized advertising technologies commanded a session to itself in Forward Advertising to the Lean Back Screen. These speakers provided many examples on how well the cable operator is positioned to participate in this arena.
The new Home Media Centers, so prolific at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, are a partial solution in providing media consumption flexibility, but fall short of providing full functionality. As well, they are expensive and not very easy to set up and subsequently use.
The speakers said that better solutions for enabling this unteathered movement is network-based and can more readily evolve. Later, other presenters drilled down into the implementation challenges such as provisioning across all these platforms, recognizing that multiple entities might be involved with “roaming” type arrangements, the difficulties of digital rights management and especially ensuring the customer has an optimized experience whether connected directly or indirectly via wireless (unified quality of service [QoS] policies).
An interesting operational challenge was described by a later speaker: Who does the customer call if they have a problem and how does an operator determine where a problem might lie under a multi-platform, roaming scenario?
There are multiple boundaries between the interconnected infrastructures, many of which are controlled by other parties. Any content from anywhere at any time requires a geographically limitless infrastructure(s) but it’s important for the customer to have an end-to-end Quality of Experience (QoE).
There is the customer’s own infrastructure (iPod, STB, cell phone, whatever), there is the “last mile” infrastructure (cable network, DSL, cellular, WiFi or WiMAX), there is the managed backbone or un-managed backbone (public Internet) and possibly all of these at the other end connecting the originating media. The speaker from the Sprint/MSO JV explained they are already confronting this challenge. Solutions are available but a whole lot of work needs to be done by all parties involved.
Over 1,000 industry engineers attended the three-day event.
Nick Hamilton-Piercy is the former CTO at Rogers Communications and now works as a company advisor.
