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Social X 2010

I’ve been called an IPTV veteran, which makes me feel a bit outdated. People must unfortunately be right because the biggest surprise when I first arrived at the Social X event in London on Tuesday was how much younger people were, with trendier clothes and many more women than at your typical “veteran’s” IPTV event. (the X in Social X is for Media, TV, Mobile, Enterprise or anything else you fancy). Also, apart from a few Nokia-laden Scandinavians, non-iPhone users were very hard to spot. In fact it almost felt like an Apple convention, with dozens of MacBooks (all pros so there must be money in Social X for now) for maybe just 3 or 4 PC’s sighted in all.

I first spoke to TV Genius. In my initial daze about how different it felt, I was wondering what a content recommendation company was doing here (or maybe I’d got it wrong and was already at IPTV World Forum) until it dawned on me that the very first really powerful feature to come out of any social X network is …  wait for it … recommendation. Well Social recommendation at least. Doh.

TV Genius is a 30-person company with a B2B model, offering search and recommendation services on sites like theGuardian.co.uk and in some IPTV deployments. I was surprised to hear that the extra content added around TV listing is still only more video content. I was expecting more OTT features like actors bios from Wikipedia or something. TV Genius told me that this is due to their clients’ requirements; their technology could apparently do it all. So far all implementations including the latest with Fetch TV have a walled-garden feel to them.

TV Genius, like its competitors, uses a mix of approaches and technologies. If full anonymity is required then you can only use an approach based on the content itself. TV Genius then use a map built from anonymous user activity. The lines and bubbles on the walls of their booth are meant to convey this map. Explicit profiles can be supported, but this seems less relevant in the TV space than on the web. Many of the technologies under the hood like collaborative filtering grew up with the Internet over a decade ago. I’d be running a bit scared if Amazon were to enter this market directly.

I popped into the Cloud Computing conference to get a flavour of what this new buzzword is all about. Just enter those three words into Google and you’ll see what I mean. Eachen Fletcher from Sporting Index gave one of those refreshing talks where he had nothing to sell, just experience to share.

Is this just a little step forward draped in oozes of hype or something real?  Like with the whole social X thing the jury is also out on this one. But gosh, I feel even more of veteran in this IT environment. I remember back in the late eighties when object orientation was going to revolutionize IT. Sure it happened, but quietly, the hype just dissipated into the ether. At the same time HTML came to enable exciting web features then Java for the apps. When it turned out to be a mess of non-maintainable spaghetti code to get anything at all sophisticated up and running, XML came along with its style sheets to separate presentation from content. Around then Larry Ellison took on Microsoft with his net computer concept, and lost. The feeling I got is that cloud computing is another episode in this same drama. Much of Ellison’s vision may just have been off by a decade or so because the web wasn’t yet ubiquitous. If I were an IT manager in 2010 I’d have a team focussing on cloud computing, especially while it’s financially trendy to shift CAPEX to OPEX. That’s the biggest benefit of cloud computing, i.e. spending a lot less to start with even if the bill, 10 years on, ends up much bigger.

Back to Social X, Tom McDonnell is the man to talk to for some straight answers here. He started testing games while still at school in Liverpool. He looks young enough for that to have been yesterday so he must qualify. But after listening to him I do believe him that it was over decade ago. He’s a techie who has kept a customer-centric approach like the CTO of a content company or the CMO of a tech one.

He met up with the cofounder of his current company Monterosa while working on BBC’s ‘Test the nation’. They left in 2003 to build the web part of the program. Since then they have specialized in real-time elements to make the TV experience more enjoyable. I suppose that’s one of his definitions of Social TV (see Agit8or’s blog and comments for more or Tom’s own definition here).

When I questioned Tom about how hard Social TV is to implement in an open i.e. OTT environment, he lamented the absence of an open standard, albeit one that simply identifies shows uniquely.

McDonnell is sceptical about obscuring the main TV screen with anything widgety, especially when a good show is on. He points out that Social TV is usually personal even when it’s around a family TV show. For the time being Monterosa therefore sees Social TV as being a multi-screen experience so you can be uniquely identified and have some privacy.

Tom agreed with me that many platform operators will try to retain control through technology and that a conflict of interest could arise with TV stations. That’s why some big Telco TV operators are trying to do business directly with the production companies that own the big shows.

In the afternoon, the panel I chaired was on the challenges faced by existing TV platforms to embrace social TV. Actually, we only had Cable platforms around the table with lively speakers from UPC and Virgin so I tried to stand in a bit for the DSL crowd. The supplier NDS and the industry body GVF made up the rest of the panel.

Despite my insistence, it turns out that the tech challenges are quite hard to pinpoint. The Appstore ecosystem captured a lot of attention with questions and comments from the audience too. That at least does have a little technology issue to it, i.e. you need an application environment rather than just a web one. NDS pointed out another: we will not be able to build Social TV with Apple’s approach to third party apps. Full multitasking will be required so you never lose an instant of the live program even if there is a surge of tweets … Apart from that it does seem plain sailing from a technology standpoint.

I agree with Agit8ors comments on the surprising lack of Canvas talk at the conference. I tried baiting my NDS speaker with the fact that they are linked to Sky, a would-be Canvas-killer, but to no avail; he just smiled back politely.

I took the panel through one of the traditional crystal ball sessions. NDS sees non-content-aware widgets dying out this year. Recommendation and specifically social recommendation (i.e. recreating the water-cooler moment) is Virgin’s bet in the short term for mass-market adoption. GVF sees more user generated content pushing social X forwards whereas UPC will be happy if the Red-button just gets a bit sexier and Flash(ier) this year.

An interesting question came in from twitter on whether Social TV would remain market specific or if we’d see some international communities emerging. Nobody agreed on this one and UPC saw it as a non-issue as most programming is market specific; the Anglo-British Virgin Media unsurprisingly concurred. I pointed out that if Social X takes off significantly this could blur some boundaries and globalize the market a bit more. Writing this now I find it a depressing prospect.

I wonder if is significant that the only meeting I’d set-up in advance, with Sofanatics, a company that is a Social TV pure player, didn’t materialise because of missed tweets. Sofanatics create virtual rooms for fans to aggregate and cheer on their teams. I later found a tweet saying they had 26,000 visitors and 2000 registered users during their winter Olympics push for the hockey semi-final between Finland and the US. Visitors came from 92 countries. I caught up with Toni Laturi from the Finnish Company, who cheered me up on globalisation at least. He said, “What we learned is that the viewers really wanted to share their emotions and passion online. One guy even promised to pay his TV fee because of the service :). Expats were very involved, although that could also be due to the difficult times of the games in the middle of the night for most of us”. It looks like Sofanatics should share their data with UPC, who don’t see Social TV crossing borders.

I left this conference with new ideas. Firstly, I won’t let the hype around Social X hide the underlying paradigm shift from me anymore. I came to the conference from an IPTV perspective, narrow-mindedly expecting Social TV on the big screen. Well no longer. Tom McDonnel convinced me that, in 2010 at least, Social TV will be a multi-screen experience i.e. laptop or iPad on your knee or Smartphone in your hand. One of the conference speakers also pointed out that the TV hardware lifecycle just couldn’t match the required pace of change of bleeding-edge technology. Maybe that’s where my lingering doubt about the technology block comes from, because all the people I spoke to were adamant that technology isn’t the issue for social TV like it was for IPTV a few years ago.

My feeling like an old fart among all the youngsters was compounded by a sense of déjà-vu. Social X conferences in 2010 feel just like IPTV conferences did in 2005. Being part of a secret elite ‘in the know’. We gambled then that we were onto something big and even if IPTV still has a long way to go it looks like we were right. What a coincidence, Ian who runs the show, also started the IPTV World Series in 2005 and is one of the rare people to have made some money out of being right with IPTV. See ya next week to rant and hopefully rave a bit about that too.

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Why I’m going to IPTV world forum – March 23rd 2010

I’ll be staying for the three days at the event next week. I always spend long moments hesitating whether such a time commitment is reasonable. I thought I’d share my thinking in case it helps you make your mind up (and helps me decide whether to fork out a couple of k€ to go to NAB next month or not).

When I worked at Orange, heading international IPTV deployment, I gave one of the first talks from a major IPTV player at one of the first versions of the show in 2005 or thereabouts. It was about the technical challenges of IPTV deployment from a Telco perspective. IPTV World Forum holds a little sense of nostalgia for me.

In the early days Junction ran the show, and I remember it feeling like a special occasion. It’s probably the nostalgia speaking or maybe the fact that as it wasn’t yet mainstream we all felt a bit more leading edge. I suppose I can replace "feel good" factor from being a pioneer then to a "feel good" factor from knowing I was here first. To illustrate the newfound importance of the show, big decisions now get initiated at Olympia and the IPTV WF awards get fought over more and more.

We’re not supposed to decide which show to go to based on the quality of the tea and biscuits (no don’t pretend you never do). In this respect IPTV WF is pretty good on logistics, except maybe fort the A/V equipment that forces me to sit in the front rows if I want to both see and hear.

The main reason I’m going is networking. There’s only so much you can do with LinkedIn & Co and face-to-face meetings do make a difference. I know at least half the companies exhibiting and over a dozen speakers so it’ll be worthwhile just to catch-up. I also need to generate some new leads for my consulting business (;-€).

I'm looking forwards to awards ceremony at the end of day one. Only the English can make a pompous event fun as well (mind you the great food & drink helps). As I'm a judge, I can’t really talk about that till the results are out … but there were loads of good entries this year.

There will be demos of some really new things I want to see at the exhibition. This year I’m looking forward to seeing the BeeSmart free middleware that’ll be launched during the show. I’m also hoping ROVI will show their new promising looking EPG offerings. As I missed the NDS widget demo at IBC I was hoping to catch up on that but I can’t see them on the exhibitor list :o( - maybe I’ll have to go to the NAB show after all.

I wrote an blog entry here on the rosy future for the IPTV Monitoring market so I’ll be asking all the vendors like Mariner, Bridgetech, Ineoquest, Agama and the new kid in town from India called First Media what they think about that i.e. do they too see a blue ocean of opportunities?

I hope to do a post-show blog on the future of interfaces so I’ll also hop into booths from some middleware people like Dreampark and Nagravision.

Many of the usual suspects from the STB arena will be at the show so I’ll be checking out where they are in terms of chipsets & new deployments (although these tend to boringly all be confidential). But the ecosystem is constantly changing as the box makers move upwards or sideways in the ecosystem so I’ll be looking out for any exciting demos from booths like Netgem, PACE, SoftAtHome, Echostar, Awox and Amino.

I’m a bit disappointed in the content recommendation supplier line-up. Recommendation is still a stumbling block that we haven’t fixed. Hopefully Gravity R&D will have a better demo than they showed at the Prague show. I don’t know why the more mature suppliers like Jinni aren’t coming to the show. That’s food for thought for another in depth analysis.

I always drop into the Edgware booth not only because it’s invariably one of the nicest but mainly because they are a surprisingly interesting company to talk to; they have a real vision.

Oh and I’ll make a point of having a proper talk with the Canadians from Evertz because I kind of botched it last time in Prague and have heard they deliver a monitoring good job for Sasktel in conjunction with Mariner Partners who btw will also both be presenting at the show.

With over 100 exhibitors I expect it will take me at least a day and half to see everything I want to, and As I’m chairing during day one I’ll be there the whole time.

There’s some luck involved in choosing the best conference to listen to unless you know the speaker beforehand. Most speakers do go to the trouble of writing interesting fresh slides and are really worth listening to. However as with any mainstream conference, some vendors that pay a lot to get to say basically what they want amazingly get away with too much sales pitch. You should complain to the organizers if you see this. I certainly do. Telcos with big IPTV deployments who also get red-carpet treatment sometimes go around with the same slide deck from conference to conference; I’ve identified the speakers by now, but it's always worth listening to them if you haven't heard it before.

In the end I clearly do recommend going (twitter me @nebul2 to meet). If you decide not to come, several of us will be reporting from the show on Videonet.

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Why Iid invest in TV monitoring if I were a banker

When Justin Lebbon, the guy behind videonet, read my latest blog post on the significance of Ineoquest’s winning a deal with France Télévisions, he pointed out that to get onto Videonet, posts have to be longer. It probably wasn’t meant that way, but it felt a bit condescending.

Hmmpf! So I started wondering why I'd felt the urge to write just a short post on a seemingly run-of-the-mill press release about yet another sale.

I had written about the customer being a TV station and the vendor being the leader in head-end monitoring from the IPTV space, so that maybe we were going towards a global leader in the IP TV (notice the space) monitoring space. So with just one small point to make I had one short blog entry to post.

But Justin’s point has been irking me to dig a bit deeper.

It turns out I wrote about a tree that was hiding a forest.

The TV world relies more and more heavily on IP for contribution, transport and distribution to and within the home. At the same time, the whole marketplace is also maturing. Different stakeholders are beginning to emerge and a new content economy will eventually stabilize.

We still don’t know if our IPTV world will become a market dominated by vertical or horizontal stakeholders or maybe something in between.

In the vertical world, content would flow from one stakeholder’s environment through another’s to be delivered to customers of yet another network. To catch-up on a missed Channel 4 program you might use a C4 widget on you TV that stream content through a network managed by Cable & Wireless. But for a BBC program you’d use iPlayer. We would seem to be headed in that direction if the Ineoquest - France Télévisions deal is at all significant. Service Level Agreements or SLAs are paramount to remain competitive in such a world. What better than QoE measurement to manage such agreements?

In the second more horizontal world, the same stakeholders would be producing and delivering content-based services to their own customers. Walled garden IPTV or Telco-TV is of this world. TV stations would carry on not caring all that much about IP quality because it wouldn’t be their problem. Although not IPTV, Sky’s products are from this world where the same company produces much of the content and delivers it themselves. Market regulators would hopefully ensure that customers would rarely be more than a click away from the competing service and in this world (looks like Britain pulled a short straw on this), QoE would remain the best metric to work on to control churn.

TV stations are still basically Content producing organisations. When transmitting through traditional broadcast networks they can always ascertain the quality of delivery by the random sampling of a few points. This worked fine for traditional analogue terrestrial and satellite, and also to a certain extent for digital terrestrial, cable and satellite.

IPTV represents extra difficulties because not only do the video streams have to go through many more layers in the network. Operators are still in many cases just learning how to properly configure IP networks for video. Fierce competition is also forcing them to use underlying infrastructure that is at the bleeding-edge of new technology.

However, if IPTV were only about Live TV, it would just be harder to get right, basically playing in the same ball court as before.

What makes quality management so different is that IPTV services have always been about more than live TV. From the source of video signal to TV set we’re moving from a one-to-many to a one-to-one architecture. As soon as VoD, delinearization or Social TV show their scary heads, we shall have to take a whole quantum leap into another level of complexity.

I haven’t seen any reliable and public stats for VoD session quality in managed networks, but you only need to glance at some Web forums to see that things aren’t as rosy as VoD system vendors and operators would have us believe, even in a walled garden environment where QoS is supposedly guaranteed. I’ve been using such a managed service at home for 5 years now and with maybe 60 films rented, I can say that about one time in 10 the VoD viewing experience gets interrupted or even cancelled. If I’m then prepared to spend 10 minutes to half an hour on the phone, I can get a refund.

Now if I ask you where are TV stations focussing their attention at the moment, the BBC’s iPlayer will probably come to mind. With an iPlayer type of service TV stations’ increase the value of their own content by making it available after airtime (I guess a very expensive premium service will one day let you access the content before airtime). Their content is being transmitted over IP on a one-to-one basis using their brand name. So TV stations are getting caught up in the Quality of Experience issues themselves.

But beyond the iPlayer example, as the IPTV ecosystem matures, different stakeholders are emerging. In some markets, one operator will provide head-end services for another competitor. Elsewhere, wholesaling is becoming commonplace. Take for example Cable & Wireless in the UK who can carry IPTV streams from a third party head end to someone else’s DSLAM. Their responsibility - enshrined in an SLA - is to deliver the content with the same quality the received it. Traditional network QoS metrics don’t always capture the whole picture. If the TV service is also monitored end-to-end wholesalers can commit to SLA’s.

Here in France one sees some pretty complex setups with for example a Bouygues Telecom IPTV customer having a service delivered through an SFR network when the video head end service is provided by Canal+. In this case Bouygues Telecom would also have an agreement with Orange to rent the last mile.

Over-the-Top or OTT content has mainly been associated with free YouTube like services; that too is changing. Even in the unlikely event that it does stay totally free, there’s only one YouTube so the quality of service delivered to people’s sitting rooms will be a key differentiator.

The emerging playing field forces the larger content creators like France Télévisions to look further down the distribution line. Even as far down as the person in front of  the screen. Their distribution possibilities are also exploding while presenting differing technical challenges in terms of Quality of Experience. In the IP space, should they concentrate their efforts on Telco-TV distribution or should they be putting more effort into their own OTT distribution? TV widgets present one of the greatest threats and opportunities they have seen for years.

To remain relevant and retain their independence TV stations will seek means of leverage to control or at least to influence different distribution channels or sometimes just to be able to make an informed choice as to which one to use. Their content represents their fundamental value so it’s only not surprising that they’ll want to protect both its quality and its integrity.

That’s why – Justin- I believe the Ineoquest deal is significant. Now will you post this?

Benjamin Schwarz

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French Public Broadcaster goes IQ

I'd don't usually comment on press releases about vendors making another sale, but this one is significant.

IPTV operators represent a red sea of cut-throat monitoring competition. Most of of the operators I know already use Ineoquest or will do so soon.

TV stations, who are relatively new to IP networks, represent a more enticing blue ocean where everyone should have a chance. But if that market also gets Ineoquested, then we’re getting closer to having a true leader in the IPTV monitoring field.

The downside is that monitoring may become like the IT market of the 1970's where decision makers always chose big blue (IBM) because that way if something went wrong they wouldn't be blamed ...

But leadership need not become dominance and the upside is that we might now get some momentum on relevant standards which will hopefully be open like TR135, so good luck IQ, as long as you remain humble and nimble, show us the way.

Ineoquest have a press release here.

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Alphabetical list of IPTV monitoring solution providers

To keep this list down to manageable size, I'm only including companies that provide a complete solution for monitoring an live IPTV service.

There are start-ups mixed with decades-old companies. Later-on I'll share some info on classifying these companies.

  • Absilion (Netrounds)
  • Agama
  • Agilent
  • BridgeTech (Sencore)
  • Cisco (VQE)
  • ExFo (Brix)
  • First Media (m-View)
  • Ineoquest
  • Infovista
  • IP Label Newtest
  • Ixia
  • JDSU (Volicon)
  • Mariner Partners (xVu)
  • Miranda
  • Mirifice
  • Mixed Signals
  • Opticom
  • Pixelmetrix
  • Psytechnics
  • Radcom (more of a VoIP specialist)
  • Shenick
  • Spirent
  • Symmetricom
  • Tektronix
  • Telchemy
  • Video Clarity
  • Witbe

Please comment to add to this list.

Ben

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Why IPTV will change the world … well at least the world of TV

In the decade after the Second World War, the art & science of modern Marketing were invented and brought the world economy into a new age. Services delivered over an IP network, like IPTV, are bringing something as momentous forward.

In an article I wrote in 2006 for the Technology Review’s inaugural French edition (it actually got published in the second), I drew a parallel between IPTV and the printing press.

IPTV has to first be TV before it can be anything else. Indeed even in today’s Web 2.0 world, users will never try all the great new IPTV services including niche - long tail & interactive content, personalisation or community services, if you don’t first give them some real TV. If THE content people want isn’t available IPTV – or any other TV – providers will have a problem. To start with IPTV doesn’t necessarily innovate. It is bringing us something we’ve had for half a century. Sure we’ve gone from Black & White to colour TV, image resolution has improved along with sound quality and even 3D is on its way, but the basic live TV service is the same.

Electronic Program Guides (EPG) are becoming the norm, offering instant access to at least the program title, schedule and a short description. But these are linked to digital TV, not necessarily IPTV. Other services not necessarily requiring IP include Personal Video Recorders (PVR) which have advantageously replaced VHS video recorders to make recording programs easier and even let you record straight off the program guide or via a web site or mobile phone interface. But common man’s life will be more radically changed by the IP part of IPTV than the TV part.

So if the TV in IPTV is still TV, it must be the IP that’s the printing press.

TV preceded IPTV by decades just like manuscripts preceded Guttenberg’s printing press by dozens of generations.

By innovating in the way written works were duplicated and disseminated throughout communities and beyond, Gutenberg changed society forever.

But it took generations of writers to realise the potential of books over manuscripts. Political pamphlets and newspapers are examples of world-changing output from the printing press but these only had a measurable impact a few generations after Guttenberg.

It’s taking IPTV a lot less time to realise the potential of IP. The first real deployments are a decade old and the first large scale deployments are half that age.

When TV is delivered though an IP network, be it the Internet or a private network, a unique one-to-one bi-directional relationship is created between the service provider and the end user. This will open up a world of new services targeting much smaller audiences that can be scattered around the globe like Diasporas. A VoD session can even be seen as a service being sold to an individual household.

In 2000 the Internet infrastructure couldn’t cope with video streams. YouTube alone has shown that that it now can. As long as some form of net-neutrality can be maintained, new “narrow cast” services like many of the long gone Web-TVs of the Internet bubble are at last viable. Digital catalogues have reached critical size so that however unusual, there will always be some content to cater for your interests. So if content remains king in the IPTV world, he’s growing a “long tail”.

Let’s just stop for minute; think what that implies going back to the world economy as it emerged from the Second World War. After the Marshall plan put European economies into forward gear, a relatively long period of prosperity ensued.

The basic operational model for most businesses was this: to optimise production, create a stock of goods (or services) then get a sales force to sell as much as possible. In the relationship between a company and its customers, it was always about pushing as much stock as possible from the stockpile to the customer and optimising that flow as seen from the companies side. It took a particularly astute and creative sales person to ask a few simple questions:

  • How do our customers perceive our products?
  • Why would they choose one brand over another?
  • What features would make my product more valuable?
  • How might they “feel” if our product or service was unavailable?
  • Once my product has been bought, how is it used in my customer’s home?

This was a radical change and we are looking at the relationship from the customer’s perspective for the first time and talking about the invention of “Marketing” itself.

My premise is that with IPTV as well as other IP based services we are very much in the position of a salesman of the late fifties. Indeed we can design, build and deliver a leading edge IPTV service, but once it has left our “factory floor” and reaches people homes, just like the goods of the fifties, its gets used and perceived in a ways we don’t really understand.

We have all experienced frustrating times talking to customer support about issues we are having with our ISP, VoIP or IPTV service. The customer representative invariably makes us do stupid things like check the mains power socket, but if they do listen to our specific issues they rarely understand - let alone have a solution. Why is it so hard to manage the Quality of Experience in the IP world?

One reason is that contrary to the tangible goods of the fifties and sixties, IP services don’t actually exist until they are consumed. Indeed it is difficult to improve the experience of a Video on Demand session in advance. This is one of the reasons the whole science of marketing has to be adapted to the world of IP.

One last point shows how fundamental the changes we are talking about are. The heavy investment big names like Google or Yahoo! are making in the TV space is telling. I don’t believe Yahoo!’s current set of TV widgets providing news, weather & stock market information in their current form as an overlay will change the world, but they are showing the way. For such initiatives to succeed, at least three breakthroughs are necessary.

The first is in the TV ecosystem, which has to enable the free flow of new services and content so that whoever has a good idea for a widget or new service can somehow provide it. This is like Apple’s AppStore on the iPhone.

The second major shift required is in the TV service interface. Indeed, with a Standard Definition (i.e. non HD) screen and a regular remote control it is hard to behave differently than a “couch potato”.

Thirdly widgets to make an impact on the living room experience, they will have to become truly interactive with the content itself, a bit like with the demos NDS gave at the 2009 IBC.

So in the end IPTV isn’t just another bit of technology but a new paradigm. We are so close to TV that we probably won’t realise the world is changing until someone tells us it already has.