WINNIPEG – The media supply chain is irrevocably more complicated and potentially scary for Canadian broadcasters, according to two sessions on personal media on Monday at the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ annual convention.
The morning session was called “Personal Media Models: Who will supply the media-savvy consumer” and the afternoon session was entitled: “New Models, New Rules: Managing the personalized media revolution.”
On demand technology of all sorts, delivered from all platforms, is irrevocably altering the way media companies do business and on demand, specifically wireless on demand, content was front and centre for panelists as they discussed how best to take advantage of the upheaval.
Not all is lost, by the way, and from the consumer standpoint, some of the new devices are pretty cool. David Neale, vice-president, service development at Rogers Communications, held up a small DVB-H (digital video broadcast to handheld) receiver currently deployed in Europe. The horizontal screen is twice the size of what we think of as a normal cell phone screen and the user can watch live TV, play video games and make phone calls on it.
It’s deployed in Asia and it’s coming here, he said in late 2006 to early 2007, and will retail around $400.
Rogers, along with Bell and Telus, is already offering low-grade video streamed to customers through MobiTV technology to handsets.
But, these new technologies won’t replace what’s out there now, just add to the media universe. “It’s incremental, not substitutional,” Neale said.
Wireless watching is growing substantially, added Raja Khanna, chief creative officer of QuickPlay Media, a company whose technology enables mobile media. So far, the top media delivered to handhelds are, in order: Music, movies, pornography, news and information and general entertainment.
After just a couple of months of operation in Canada and with just 5% to 8% of the handhelds in Canada capable of showing video, QuickPlay has counted over 100,000 downloads with 25% month-over-month growth. “And, it’s across the country,” he added.
Cool services to come? Controlling your personal video recorder with your wireless phone, when you’re not home.
All these things will be enabled over multiple networks, added Alcatel’s Zlatko Krstulich. While cable has a fat pipe already, telcos are spending hundreds of millions pushing fibre deeper into their networks. And new devices, already deployed in Europe, will hop from wired to wireless networks seamlessly, picking whichever route is most efficient to deliver the content.
As Neale pointed out: Continuing the current MobiTV model long term “would be an act of insanity” given the costs of spectrum and the ramp-up coming from new users.
Corus Radio’s JJ Johnston profiled his company’s newest division, Splice Interactive Media, which is focused on serving advertisers across all new and old platforms, from regular ol’ radio to podcasts, webcasts, games and text messaging.
Johnston pointed to 102.1 The Edge’s recent webcast ads for the Ford Focus, where morning show co-host was filmed being silly with the car as one example of a cross-platform, innovative marketing idea.
But as we shift to personal media, our regulatory system hasn’t quite adapted, said a couple of those who were part of the afternoon session on personal media – and the loopholes now jeopardize the public policy initiatives of the federal government and the Broadcast Act. Despite the concentration on the future, though, CHUM Ltd.’s vice-president planning and regulatory affairs Peter Miller said what faces his company right now “is far more mundane.”
He pointed to the video on demand capabilities of the BDUs. Originally conceived as primarily a movie-delivering service, VOD has morphed into something else with all of the TV and other content now available.
With different tiers of VOD, such as children’s on demand programming, for example, “you can get everything from an SVOD service as what you’d get from a specialty service,” said Miller, and that impacts CRTC policies like genre-protection for specialty services in the space now being carved out by the cable companies’ VOD services.
“That’s something I worry about,” he added.
Telus’ assistant vice-president broadband policy, Jay Thomson, whose company also has BDU licenses in Alberta and British Columbia (which hasn’t launched, but scuttlebutt on the floor here says it’s coming in December), almost sounded like a cable guy – and he’s a former CCTA executive – saying that distributors and broadcasters must work together to best serve customers who have grown used to on demand choice.
Thomson called for more regulatory flexibility. “We’re not here to screw the broadcasters,” he said.
Miller, on the other hand, pointed out that working together and flexibility to BDUs often means “drop your wholesale rate and provide VOD for free” and that BDUs really want no regulation.
Dr. James Wendorf, a vice-president of Philips Electronics, who was also on the afternoon panel, said it was a “sad state” that distributors and broadcasters were still “fighting instead of looking out for what you’re bringing to the end consumer.”
However, if we’re to have a country of our own, said Miller, we need some media regulation that sticks. “We have a country that has no logical reason to exist,” he said. “If we can’t maintain a separate rights market, then policy is out the window… it’s a matter of political will.”
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