LAS VEGAS – Spending a little time listening to some of the people working on IPTV – and among those making IPTV work, you can kind of see why Bell Canada hasn’t yet launched.
Because it already has a “me too” service in Bell ExpressVu, it is in no hurry to rush a terrestrial service to market before it is completely different than what is already out there.
Today during IPTV World at NAB, Microsoft TV’s CTO and general manager of engineering, Peter Barrett provided an overall glimpse at what might be to come from Bell (assuming they’re able to get through their ownership issues and refocus on IPTV, something the company has delayed), which has said in the past it will only launch a service once it can be significantly different from what’s already in the market.
He – and others, for that matter – spoke of the day where TV content follows users from device to device, where user generated content is integrated into the experience and even how gaming consoles will let viewers watch The Sopranos, for example, and talk about it on their Xbox headsets, even though one may be in Bangor, Maine and the other in Bancroft, Ontario.
“There’s no limit on the number of services you can put on IPTV,” said Barrett, “and that’s materially different from broadcast.”
Setting aside our myriad Canadian content rules, Barrett added that there’s no reason why the globe’s 60 million expat Indians “shouldn’t be able to watch Bollywood movies or Indi television at home in Palo Alto or the UK or wherever,” he added.
There’s also no reason, he added why his “adorable baby pictures” shot with a camera phone shouldn’t be instantly available on his TV and his mother’s television set in Sydney, Australia.
Geography, or the type of media or device or transmission or receiver “shouldn’t matter at all,” he added.
And if the current industry players don`t do it now, customers will find a way to use existing technology to do it on their own.
He pointed to Xbox Live, where users with a broadband connection can play against or with each other and chat as they go, no matter where they might be in the world. And with Xbox as a video delivery mechanism spanning territories and countries, users “start developing a community centred around a definitive interest that has nothing to do with geography.”
That in itself, could help solve the video search problems we face either on line or on TV. “’Dude, have you seen this?’ is a much better way of finding things than an alphabetical list found in most program guides,” explained Barrett.
On Tuesday, Shawn Strickland, vice-president product management for FiOS, Verizon’s IPTV service, director outlined his company’s vision of IPTV. Verizon has invested, and continues to invest multiple billions of dollars to bring fibre to the curb, something other telcos like AT&T and Bell Canada have been reluctant to do, given the cost.
Strickland, of course, said Verizon could envision no other way, because of the content and services FTTH allows the company to deliver.
In 2003-04, Verizon decided the gap between what pure IPTV can offer and what consumers desire was far too wide and built its FTTH architecture using a hybrid of IPTV and RF.
It’s turned out to be the right decision, despite the cost. “HD is a tremendous driver for us,” he said. “Over half of our customer have HD boxes or HD-DVR boxes.”
The financial analysts, added Strickland, “have come around to the view that this is the right architecture. It leaves us enough room for growth as IPTV matures.”
Today, his co-worker, Joseph Ambeault, offered a deeper picture of what Verizon does, keying on his VOD offering. He said it’s all well and good that Verizon has 8600 pieces of content available, but admitted searching it with today’s technology is impossible.
“The problem is it’s buried in this hierarchical set of folders and doesn’t respect how we look for content,” said Ambeault who said Verizon research shows people spend a lot of time still flipping – grazing and searching for something. “This is when they say there are 500 channels but nothing on.”
He proposes giving control of VOD programming over to the creators or broadcasters themselves so that every day there is a much smaller list of content available for on demand viewing.
“We need to let (viewers) navigate how they want, not what some engineer decided it should be.”
Ambeault also added that IP technology should allow for far better advertising since it can allow targeting as well as measurement – and that since direct mail marketers can figure out how to target homes with baby food mailers, there shouldn`t be too many privacy issues standing in the way of targeted TV ads.
