TORONTO – It isn’t too often you hear a cableco or telco admit to using a heavy fist when it comes to protecting and maintaining their walled gardens, but at least one cable executive offered up a sort-of “mea culpa” during a session on new media and convergence at the Canadian Telecom Summit held today at the Toronto Congress Centre.
“We’re really moving from a tyranny of broadcasters to a republic of users where people will decide when they want to watch their content, and ultimately, where they want to watch their content,” said David Purdy, vice-president and general manager of video products for Rogers Cable.
He later clarified during an interview that in referring to broadcasters he was speaking about programmers or content aggregators in general, and he included Rogers in that group.
“It’s clear the balance of power is shifting,” Purdy said. “The notion that you watch your favourite shows on an appointment basis is becoming antiquated.”
And even the notion of using a personal video recorder to record TV programs is becoming antiquated, Purdy admitted. “Rogers is committed to providing a rich video-on-demand experience so that would make the need to have a PVR less relevant. It’s a very inefficient thing to put a hard drive on everybody’s set-top box, when you can have one centralized VOD service,” he said.
“We (content creators and distributors) should be working together on this centralized VOD model, because it is by far the most broadcaster- and cable-friendly solution out there,” Purdy said.
Making content available anywhere at any time will be a core strategy behind CTVglobemedia’s multiplatform approach to presenting its MuchMusic Video Awards ceremony this weekend, according to Brad Schwartz, senior vice-president and general manager of CTVglobemedia’s Much MTV Group.
“Whether it’s television, whether it’s events on the ground, whether it’s online or VOD, whether it’s mobile, we want our content available all the time and absolutely everywhere,” Schwartz said,” because we believe the more you stretch your content across more platforms, the more emotionally connected and engaged people become with your content and therefore want to see more and more.”
As explained by Sean Seaton, director of Microsoft Canada’s communications sector, Marshall McLuhan’s visionary statement about “the medium is the message” no longer holds true today.
“The television, the PC, the mobile phone, they really no longer define the message or the entertainment experience, if you will. It’s less about the platform, and really about driving content and experiences over that platform,” Seaton said.
Without a doubt, the vast majority of new Internet traffic is video content, said Derek Kuhn, vice-president of emerging technology and media at supplier Alcatel-Lucent. In order for service providers to build out the necessary infrastructure and be profitable doing so, Kuhn says he sees three service provider business models emerging: the end-user pays the service provider; the over-the-top (OTT) video distributor pays the service provider; or the middleman/broker pays the service provider.
Given the exponential growth of video content, it’s only a matter of time before more and more mobile users start to demand a better-quality video experience. However, perhaps surprisingly, a recent survey by KPMG found 52% of respondents were already satisfied with the experience of watching video over their mobile phone.
One thing is clear, said Microsoft’s Seaton: “We’re not going to be able to slow down the momentum of that (new media consumer) community and how they drive the demand for content across multiple devices and multiple media.”
