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Google still playing catch up with Android TV

In this first blog of our Android TV series, Philip Hunter looks at some of the reasons why Google doesn't seem to have been third-time lucky with its new Foray into the sitting room.

Android TV, Google’s heavily leaked third effort to crack the living room, arrived as expected at its annual Developer conference at the end of June 2014, but once again failed to ignite the field. Google is still playing catchup in its attempts to conquer TV, with the only consolation being that its rivals such as Apple and Microsoft are also floundering in their attempts to stamp their authority on the big screen. Apple TV after all is seven years old now and can still at best be counted as only a moderate success, having failed to establish any sort of market dominance even close to that achieved by iOS for both tablets and smartphones. One reason is that Apple’s iron grip on its ecosystem has proved a handicap in keeping the device isolated and discouraging developers.

Google was determined with Android TV to avoid that fate and continue with its open approach to maximize third party app development with a variety of incentives. But this immediately begs the question for developers of whether Android TV is worth the trouble, unlike the versions for smartphones and tablets where it was always clear there would be a big market. In the case of TV it is still not obvious at all that Android will succeed, given that the market for streaming platforms is already very crowded, with Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One as well as Apple TV among leading established contenders. There is also Google’s own Chromecast HDMI dongle, representing its second attempt at TV after the abject failure of Google TV. Chromecast has been a reasonable success because of its low price tag of $35 and flexibility, encouraging users to try it alongside their existing pay TV package if they have one, rather than as their primary source of content. But it means Google is now sending mixed and confused messages to both consumers and developers. With Chromecast, Google had given the impression that developers could stop building apps and instead create webpages optimized for the TV screen that would receive commands from an Android smartphone. If Chromecast stays around as it looks like it will, developers now face having to build and support two interfaces to cover the Google TV universe, one for Chromecast and one for Android TV.

The underlying problem though may be with Google’s new strategy of shoehorning Android for TV rather than creating a new operating system. Google is obviously trying to make Android into a ubiquitous operating system with variants for all device platforms, as was evident at its recent so called I/O developers’ conference. There Google unveiled Android Wear for wearables like wristwatch computers, Android Auto for car dashboards and Android One for a new brand of affordable smartphones prices at under $150, as well as Android TV. There is every reason to expect that Android Wear and Android One will be great successes as they are still very much in the heartland of mobile handsets, but with Auto and to an even greater extent TV Google is stretching the envelope of the operating system a long way. History tells us that attempts to create an operating system of everything are doomed to failure, as Microsoft seems to be finding with Windows Phone. Apple had the sense to create a radically new operating system for mobile devices in iOS rather than attempting to adapt the MacOS from its desk top perch. It reaped the rewards with the iPhone and then the iPad.

This leads to the other problem, which is that with Android TV Google is still cast in the role of follower rather than leader, which is not how it grew up to become the world’s most valuable brand. In search Google originally rose to dominance over rivals like Yahoo, AltaVista and Microsoft because it had superior technology and was quickly able to assume a leadership position that came to be reinforced by its human and financial resources. Of course it has been able to reallocate those resources to TV, but without so far being able to conjure up any killer technology.

Android TV actually seems rather similar to Apple TV for the GUI and is modelled on Amazon’s Fire TV in its support for voice input for searching video content. Indeed Google has instructed its developers to avoid need for any text input at all if possible and to rely largely on voice. Google has also stripped out well known features of Android on smartphones, such as support for VoIP, cameras, touchscreens and NFC (Near Field Communication), which are all deemed superfluous for a streaming set top box like device. This is well and good, since it avoids an Android TV box being an over bloated version of a smartphone or tablet. But this may also expose the limitations of the platform, especially as Google is indicating that the operating system will really come of age with its next generation called Android L, which was also previewed at that I/O conference and scheduled for launch towards the end of the year. Android L is a radical rewrite, with improved animation and audio, as well as 3D and contextual awareness, which will all feed into the TV version. Developers may therefore decide to wait until this next generation has arrived before committing to Android TV. Android L will also include many features specific to mobile handsets, including a new battery saving mode, which are mostly irrelevant for the TV version. In this sense Android L will compound rather than solve the problem of becoming too bloated. It may be just a matter of time before the TV version of Android becomes divorced altogether from the mainstream of the operating system, but meanwhile it will most likely fail again to put Google on the podium for OTT TV.

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Wi-Fi offload can help mobile operators deliver network neutrality

Network neutrality has come back to the boil in 2014 following US carrier Verizon’s famous Federal court victory in January over the regulator FCC (Federal Communications Commission), allowing it to differentiate between services delivered to its broadband customers. This was followed in April by the European Union approving strict network neutrality with the message it would take a much tougher stance than the FCC in upholding the rules. Naturally this was widely interpreted as setting Europe apart from the US, but the reality is that both are taking a more nuanced approach than in the past. Even the EU proposals allow for provision of specialized services, providing they do not intrude into network capacity set aside for the general Internet. The tones may be different but the broader implication both in the US and Europe is that network neutrality can never be fully attained through legislation, any more than true equality of wealth can be achieved via measures such as progressive taxation – both are aspirations or focal points.

For mobile operators the aspiration of network neutrality has assumed a logistical and economic dimension with the great proliferation of data hitting their infrastructures. Many have opposed strict net neutrality for the simple reason that their core and backhaul networks have limited capacity and would be unable to cope without traffic engineering and the ability to differentiate between different service or application types.

But now Wi-Fi offload has entered to change the game, giving operators an option for relieving their overstretched backhaul networks and for that matter their radio access capacity as well, by taking advantage of broadband infrastructures. It was at the Mobile World Congress in 2013 that offload first seemed to have risen right up the agenda for mobile operators. Generally, particularly before deployment of 4G/LTE, broadband networks had greater capacity and crucially lower costs than the fixed backhaul networks serving radio base stations. For this reason those major Telcos with their own network of hot spots have been leading the march towards Wi-Fi offload. In the US AT&T has built large Wi-Fi hot zones in mostly urban areas with high levels of cellular traffic, specifically for offload to help relieve congestion on its core mobile network.

The implications of such offloading for network neutrality have not attracted much attention, but are likely to be profound nonetheless. The fundamental point is that by freeing up capacity on the mobile network, offloading can help mobile operators meet their net neutrality obligations as laid down by regulators in the region concerned, while still having scope to offer specialized services. An operator could say offer an OTT video service such as Netflix with guaranteed QoS over the cellular network, resorting to Wi-Fi offload for third party OTT services such as YouTube. Alternatively Wi-Fi could be used for specialized services, especially by operators like AT&T that have their own overlapping hot spots and cellular networks on a large scale.

We are already seeing this happen, with Sprint in the US now offering calling and messaging over Wi-Fi when within range of suitable hot spots. Sprint incidentally was one of the first major carriers in the world to make serious use of Wi-Fi offloading for data.

We are going to see plenty more such offerings over the coming years. It will be interesting to see the extent to which operators will align Wi-Fi and cellular within heterogeneous service offerings effectively to escape the shackles of net neutrality while obeying the basic rules as stipulated by regulators.

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Strategy seems so damned simple for Netflix, so why are OTT strategies so painful for everyone else?

Informa invited me to host an analyst breakfast briefing at 8AM this morning at the kick-off to TV Connect 2014.

After my spectacular failure to draw a crowd two years ago with a talk on “the death of IPTV”, I believe I learnt from my marketing mistakes. Today’s talk was about something people wanted to hear apparently because the table was packed.

Apart from friends Thierry Fautier from Harmonic, Tanja Huether from Siemens, Arman Aygen and Olivier Gravier from Mariner we had people from MBC, Telecom Italia, Citrix, IET, Mediamorph, Technisat and a few others whose names I didn’t catch.

The session was lively and always interactive.

Before looking at operators themselves it’s always healthy to concentrate first on the person that really matters. I therefore kicked off with a focus on the end-user: when she wants to watch something OTT what comes to her mind as possibilities:

1. Getting it from her provider – as part of her subscription

  • Incumbent pay TV examples include beIN, SKY Go, Canal Plus and soon we learnt MBC,
  • Some incumbent Telcos that usually force IPTV sales onto Internet access often also offer OTT exclusively to their subs, but because of the forced sale penetration may be high with very low usage.

2. From a pure OTT service

  • iTunes with dedicated country store
  • Netflix / Quickflix / iCflix / WhateverNextFlix

3. Workarounds, using semi-legal setups

  • i.e. VPN + Netflix, Sharing passwords amongst family members, …

4. Piracy

  • Torrents
  • Pirate device like “Magic Box”
  • Pirated DVDs
  • Illegal OTT streaming

This sparked a discussion on whether people would mix & match to get the best possible deal or if most of us are actually lazy buggers after all. The consensus was for the latter.

We then zoomed in to the different strategic intents different stake holders light have:

Objective Telco Pay TV Pure Difficulty
Innovation leadership ✔✔ ✔✔✔ easy
Cross/Up-selling ✔ easy
Extend footprint ✔ ✔ easy
Stickiness – lower churn ✔ ✔✔✔ moderate
Acquire new Subs ✔ ✔ ✔✔✔ hard
Grow ARPU ✔✔✔ ✔ very hard
Lower Capex ✔✔ ✔ moderate
Lower Opex ✔ ✔ it depends
Lower customer acquisition cost ✔ ✔✔✔ easy

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This table clearly shows that new-entrant, pure-players have a straightforward objective: they’re in the game to gain new clients, that’s it!

The pay TV operators have a much tougher situation with multiple objectives that are hard to align. Telco’s have it hardest an with yet wider spread of their strategic intent. There as some consensus that this is part of the reason why so many operators feel they are biting their leg off with OTT even if they know that it's part of their future.

For some reason this got us talking about the value a brand adds to OTT content. Nobody in the group denied the fact that billions upon billions spent on content doesn’t make an operator brand into a content brand with two small exceptions being Belgacom and PCCW. BT spend spree on football left the group quite bemused. Switching over to why Apple seems to deliver a persistently better viewing experience over the Apple TV, we learned from someone in the know that their technology is pretty much all home-grown, from the encoders to the players including content security.

Someone mentioned the recent Comcast-Netflix deal, which got the group into a discussion on how Telcos will be able to deliver better QoS. This may make them feel better but don't do much in the present.

Some metrics were shared within the group where is transpired that two major European pay TV platforms had achieved a take-up of their pure-play OTT offer that was smaller than 5% of their pay TV subscriber base. However take-up of “walled garden OTT” services within the subscriber base was much healthier with a German operator seeing up to 25% take-up in less than a year…

Everyone was so eager to participate that we couldn’t really conclude before Informa ushered us off to the main conference. I did leave the group with the open question of whether subscribers will accept to lower their expectations from DVB broadcast's always-working, in exchange for lower cost, more content, personalisation etc.

There's a candidate for next year analyst briefing.

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Seven simple reasons why UHD/4K in the living room makes sense, where 3D didn’t

It's easy after the fact to say "I told you so", but 3D never happened in the living room as we pointed out four years ago here.

Looking at the world though the same prism, here are my seven bullet points summarizing why UHD/4K will happen. If you're not sure what UHD/4K really is, see this quick guide here.

I. 4K doesn't require special glasses.

II. Almost any content can be up-scaled, making it look better in higher resolution.

III. 4K/UHD improves viewing experience all the time, not just during the wow! moments of a 3D movie, and never makes you seasick.

IV. Four times the resolution makes the viewing experience more immersive reducing the need for 3D content in the first place, and 8K will just do this again.

V. 4K/UHD will make 3D catalogues look insignificant in size as easy re-mastering of movies means UHD/4K VoD will be here before we even notice, which is what Netflix seems to be betting on.

VI. Workflows and post-production may indeed be tough in 4K/UHD, but they’re a piece of cake compared to 3D ones.

VII. Business models and device penetration are still holding back live 4K/UHD streams and the ink still needs to dry on HEVC. But the reason for being and value proposition oh live UHD is clear. What was a live 3D stream going to be used for?

I'll add-to or amend this list. Let me know your thoughts.

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LTE Broadcast part 5/5: Verizon prepares for first commercial launch Q3 2014

We spoke to Bill Goers, head of the wireless demonstration team at Alcatel-Lucent, which supplied the platform for the Verizon Wireless LTE Broadcast trial at the recent US Super Bowl.

Following its successful demonstration of LTE Broadcast at the recent US Super Bowl, Verizon Wireless is now engaged in the final run in towards the world’s first commercial launch of a service based on eMBMS (Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) technology in the third quarter of this year. Verizon Wireless’ director of mobile video delivery Parissa Pandkhou indicated that this would happen after the relevant network infrastructure upgrades had been performed by the middle of the year. This includes upgrading the MME (Mobility Management Entity) in the base station to enable broadcast over the radio access network (RAN) and also deploying the BM-SC (Broadcast Multicast Service Center) for session and transmission control along with security and content synchronization. The eMBMS Gateway also has to be installed to enable IP multicast distribution across the operator’s core and backhaul network. LTE Broadcast is multicast out as far as the RAN, allowing operators to select which cells receive the streamed video content. Verizon Wireless has selected both Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as co-suppliers of this LTE Broadcast platform.

The handsets also need to be upgraded and so Pandkhou pointed out that at the same time Verizon Wireless was working with manufacturers to ensure there would be a reasonable number of LTE Broadcast capable smartphones and tablets by the time of the launch. For the Super Bowl demo, which we first reviewed as it was happening in the fourth blog in this series, Verizon Wireless used two handsets that are already LTE Broadcast capable. One was Verizon’s own branded tablet running an LTE module provided by Paris based 4G chipset maker Sequans and the other the commercially available Samsung Galaxy Note 3 5.7 inch smartphone with an LTE chipset from Qualcomm.

The Super Bowl was not a field test but featured demonstrations from a booth in the ground through which 7000 people passed during the event. The objective was not to assess the technology, which had already been proven, but to play around with use cases and obtain public feedback that would help determine the shape of the service on the launch.

Indeed the platform is now ready to go and Verizon Wireless could launch the service very quickly, according to Alcatel-Lucent’s head of wireless demonstration Bill Goers. But first Verizon wants to work out how best to charge for it. While the Super Bowl demo could not directly answer that question it did provide a lot of valuable feedback about the sort of features that would interest users and therefore at the very least make a mobile service stickier. The key point was that LTE Broadcast enables a sporting event to replicate many of the video features people get at home on their TVs, by effectively turning their handsets into mobile PVRs (Personal Video Recorders). These include commentaries, instant replays, game statistics and interviews with players.

Some of these were provided during the Super Bowl demo, with the additional ingredient of support for user generated content. There is the potential to enable uploading of video from spectators at an event, which could be a concert as well as a sporting contest, for example to provide different camera angles and perspectives beyond those captured by professional camera crews. As Goers noted this would require some moderating function but has the potential to add value by generating novel video streams that can be watched while the event is still going on, or even near live. Such content can be made available as a progressive download so that users can start watching immediately while also having it available for subsequent viewing. In this way LTE Broadcast can deliver a video experience that is in some respects superior to the one available at home.

This ability of LTE Broadcast to at least match the home viewing experience is also appealing to leagues and sports organizers, the US NFL (National Football League) in the case of Super Bowl. The NFL still derives 40% of its income from paying spectators at the gate and yet numbers have been declining because the ever improving experience of watching on TV has made some people question whether it is worth paying up to $100 or more to attend the games, often in the cold and with a poorer view of the action than they are getting at home. The NFL is very interested in the potential of LTE Broadcast to attract more people to games, which itself suggests one avenue to monetization. The LTE operator could take a proportion of gate money over and above a target amount.

What seems unlikely is that users will be charged extra for LTE Broadcast at these events, given that the objective is to enhance the experience of attending without imposing yet another tariff on top of the gate fee. There is though the great potential for location based advertising and information services not just at sporting events or concerts but also at other venues where large numbers of people congregate on a more continuous basis, such as airports, shopping malls and college campuses.  All bets are on during these early days for LTE Broadcast but there is a strong and mounting conviction that revenue opportunities will be there for the taking.

Companies that we have mentioned in the series include Alcatel Lucent, Birdstep Technology, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Sequans, and the operators that have been the most open about their efforts are Verizon and Telstra.

This concludes our 5 part series on LTE Broadcast, which started here.

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LTE Broadcast part 4/5: Mobile broadcast comes of age at last with Verizon Super Bowl demo

A major milestone in the checkered history of mobile broadcast has been reached with a demonstration at the US Super Bowl, one of the country’s biggest and most iconic sporting events. For years mobile broadcast has stuttered, let down by poor business models, the cost of infrastructure and lack of support on consumer devices. While all of these remain hurdles, the latest version of the technology, LTE Broadcast, does really look as if at last it is going to prevail over them. It is ironic that the first LTE Broadcast transmission over a commercial LTE network by Australian operator Telstra in October 2013 almost coincided with the closure of the one of the last services based on the earlier DVB-H technology that was once widely viewed as opening the era of mobile broadcast. The fact that did not happen was not really a reflection of DVB-H itself but more the costs associated with its deployment and fact that devices did not support it.

While talk of successful business models and monetization is still premature, two big related factors have changed in favour of mobile broadcast. These are the arrival of tablets and larger smartphones as attractive and capable viewing devices, which in turn is driving up mobile data traffic at almost exponential rates. Much of that traffic soaking up backhaul bandwidth and RAN (Radio Access Network) spectrum is unicast video. Yet a lot of that at certain peak times is live streaming video that is consumed by many people at a given time. If it could be multicast, then only one instance of that video would need to be transmitted across a given backhaul link and RAN cell. The potential for cost saving as well as improved QoS is immense.

Events like Super Bowl are precisely what we mean here, since there are large numbers of people in one place, many of whom would love to snack relevant video on their mobile handsets such as action replays, or associated data like player stats. Verizon’s Super Bowl experiment is not full scale as it does not involve general user handsets. It will not yet indicate what impact the technology has on end to end network performance and congestion. But it is a good proof of concept that will be followed by larger experiments when wider handset support is available.

In fact the Verizon Wireless live demo, running over five days at Bryant Park in New York, involves streaming of live NFL (National Football League) content to dedicated tablets in the facility called "Verizon Power House" set up in Bryant Park using LTE Broadcast technology provided by chip maker Sequans. The tablets are running Sequans' eMBMS-capable Mont Blanc LTE platform and issued to visitors try out the LTE streaming prior to and during the event.

While this was going on, European operators such as EE and Orange France have been carrying out small-scale trials of LTE Broadcast technology, having in the past tried out DVB-H. They now believe, like Verizon, that the initial motivation for LTE Broadcast will be to optimize capacity and improve service quality for customers in crowded areas. But as Verizon has noted, availability of mobile broadcast in such crowded areas will at the very least help gain and retain customers, with business opportunities such as location based advertising quickly following.

The other key thing is that LTE Broadcast has unwavering support from key industry players like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, as well as those like Qualcomm that got their fingers burned earlier on with mobile broadcast. We are now looking at handset availability and the first operational services sometime in 2015.

We’ll be talking to Alcatel Lucent in part five of this series, stay tuned.

Part 3 of this series is here.