DENVER – A growing number of people, as they arise each morning, are not reaching for the TV or radio to find out what’s going on in their world.
Instead, “the first thing they reach for is some personal device that won’t be plugged into the wall,” said Time Warner Cable chief technology officer Mike LaJoie during the opening general session of the CTAM Summit this morning. And since “we own this great big plug,” he added, “that affects us all.”
“The world is going to look very different five years from now.”
Look at what’s happened in the last five, just in this industry. Cable has millions of voice customers, hundreds of new digital channels, dozens of HD channels, huge VOD servers, all sorts of new products and services enabled by its high speed platform and is growing into the business space.
So anyone who believes cable has been slow or standing still just “hasn’t been paying attention,” said LaJoie later in the session.
Getting new technology out at the right time that works well and in a way consumers want – and that is also profitable – “is an interesting combination of art and science,” he continued.
Comcast CTO Tony Werner talked about the early days in video on demand, when he and then-Rogers Cable CTO Nick Hamilton-Piercy showed company founder Ted Rogers what VOD could do. He recalls Rogers saying: “Quit it. It’s like I’m in a prison camp and you’re showing me all this food and I can’t eat it.”
The point is that the technology, years before deployment, “could” work, but was not yet deployable. That and no content owners would sell the rights to cable for VOD.
And even when it was deployed, it was so expensive to build and run “We didn’t want too many people to use it a lot during peak times,” said Werner, a former Rogers CTO himself.
But VOD has now developed to the point that Comcast has, at any given moment, 1,000 HD titles available on demand, let alone its SD VOD.
So, when the industry is talking about what’s next, like EBIF, far better on-screen search and dynamic ad insertion, the leaders are pushing, but are rolling several big stones up the same hill, simultaneously.
And, added LaJoie, you never can predict the way things will turn out. A decade ago, he remembers, the challenge was who would win “the battle for the living room”, the PC or the TV. Turns out there was no big battle and the explosion of personal devices powered by the dramatic decrease in storage costs has rendered such a fight moot as everyone scrambles to serve customers content wherever, whenever and however they want it.
And with a programmer on the panel this morning, Fox Cable Networks’ president Rich Battista, the traditional contention between content and carriers reared its head when the discussion turned to network DVR.
A battle could be brewing here as programmers have always wanted to nuke the fast-forward capabilities altogether on all technology, ensuring their ads are seen. “When I think about fast-forwarding, it brings shivers up and down my spine,” said Battista. U.S. cable companies have proven themselves open to this concept though, and have disabled FF in some areas on VOD or with network DVRs in the belief their customers won’t mind, as long as the ads are targeted (which they aren’t, yet).
But moderator Molly Wood, of CNetTV insisted consumers, who love the FF button won’t stand for that and operators and programmers will have a fight on their hands.
And if that makes them angry enough to cut the cable (which the MSOs have yet to see any real evidence of) and look for over the top applications on broadband via an Xbox or other, LaJoie cut to the chase, saying: I still think aggregating video content in a very high quality way and bringing it into the home is a model that will work for a very long time.”
But if some customers seek video elsewhere? “They’re still getting it over our DOCSIS, so…”
