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Standards in the age of Connected TV

Tomorrow I’m speaking at the Future TV conference in Copenhagen (if you speak Danish take a look here).

My presentation is about standards in the age of the connected TV, and here’s what I’ll be saying.

I’ll start by stressing the fact that issues are fundamentally different for:

  • Channels,
  • TV platforms,
  • CE vendors,
  • Telcos,
  • OTT players

In setting the scene I be wondering what the jury on the lean-back lean-forward debate will decide. It seems that globally, no unique view on what the connected TV is prevailing yet.

Mixing TV & Web has been a hot topic for over 15 years, so why all the fuss now?

Firstly devices in people’s homes have comparable power and screen size to a PC. Secondly, the mobile Internet actually works, at last. Finally broadband has become a commodity.

But there are still some clouds the horizon. There is a possibility that you can’t watch what you want because you have the wrong TV set! This would be the case if Sony were to do a deal with one OTT catch up TV supplier and Samsung use a different one. Another ominous sign on the horizon are the broadband caps being (re)introduced in the US. Such capping could still thwart OTT in its infancy if the movie industry gets its act together faster and better than the music industry did.

Leaving future gazing aside for a moment, the market has already telling us quite a lot. For example, compulsory standards rarely work, at least they haven’t in this space as the EBU’s attempt at enforcing MHP showed.

Standards efforts in the connected TV space have come from different stakeholders. Broadcasters have only really wanted a TeleText 2.0 for now, 40 years after V1.0. Then there’s the CE industry that has totally failed so far, by delivering a connected TV jungle and device-centric standards which are sound, even good (e.g. DLNA), but that still need a lot of work before they can be used to implement usable services. Standards bodies close the scene.

Indeed the usual suspects such as ITU-T or EBU are taking standards based approach and have, as previously stated, staunchly supported MHP (only deployed in Italy and on some Bluray players). Ad-hoc groups like the OIPF (whose work is based on W3C, DBV etc.) also include HbbTV (which is now an ETSI standard deployed in only France, Germany & UK for Freesat), YouView is (for now) the standard for the rest of the UK.

But a product-based approach could standardize the marriage of TV and the Web. The big names from the Web include Apple, Google TV and Yahoo! Widgets. Some operators are bringing out their own products like Cubovision from Italy’s Telecom Italia. Then from the TV solution providers there are a endless hopefuls from the big NDS or Nagra, through the Set makers like Samsung or Sony to device and solution makers like TiVO or even Netgem.

Some standard issues I will cover include the overwhelming of standardization processes. Standardization efforts take time as consensus is needed; yet the market is moving faster & faster… Within good old-fashioned IPTV standards there already is a clear geographic split with ATIS standardizing IPTV in the US while OIPF is doing the same elsewhere and NTT is doing it’s own thing in Japan.

There are even some double standards with a disconnect between actions and intentions. A “Land-grab” is underway with UI & content used to differentiate connected TV services. Standards make differentiation harder and most are pushing them under the carpet for now. The OIPF for example has many CPE vendors as members, but they are not mandating the specifications within their own technology yet. Even Telco’s don’t seem to push that hard to live out their commitments. So far, only broadcasters are playing the standards game by the book.

The Open IPTV Forum or OIPF defines services that use managed as well as unmanaged network delivery. As broadcasters are only interested in unmanaged delivery for now (i.e. OTT), HbbTV only uses part of OIPF. As there is a lot of overlap at the technical level, in ideal world, YouView could use HbbTV as an underlying standard. In the end this will happen anyhow, not because the ideal world will be reached, but because one of the two standards will die and the other will take it over.

In my talk I’ll also focus on what the EBU has been saying recently on Hybrid standards. In London during the Connected TV Summit this month, they noted that content consumption is changing with off-line usage, the diversity of devices and delinearization. Of course business models still rely on content, which must explain the still rising viewing figures for linear TV in many Europe countries. EBU say that broadcasters don’t innovate, lack global approach and still “control” the TV set in the home. EBU further note that CE vendors are already in the market because of falling margins and Improved connectivity that have together created the ideal opportunity. However they have global solutions that don’t always fit the varying markets and are not at all interoperable.

Zooming in on YouView, I’ll remind the audience of its design goals which were to:

  • align with industry trends,
  • run on silicon products that are available in the market now,
  • use open source software where appropriate,
  • provide suitable APIs to abstract from underlying software implementation,
  • and allow manufacturers to differentiate their products.

Then what about HbbTV?

Well it defines itself as a minimum requirement for a business neutral technology platform and an boasts being an available ETSI standard for hybrid entertainment services, based on other standards from OIPF, CEA, DVB and W3C.

Its 3-fold objective is to simplify the implementation in devices, leave room for differentiation and limit the investment for CE manufacturers. Hmm sounds a bit familiar.

HbbTV is still very young and there are already clamors for some key features to be included in future versions. Adaptive streaming, widgets, second screen support, DRM frameworks and push-VOD via broadcast are just some such examples.

I’m not sure how the future will come about, but I will suggest that we are waiting for our “iPod moment” in the connected TV standards space.

Will it be design driven like the iPod itself by design and tight control to bring true usability? Will it come form a business model innovation like the iPhone that added Apps to an already great user experience? Or will users decide on what the next big thing is on their own, like they did with the barbaric user experience of the SMS that answered a true need.

Wrapping up I’ll note that current standards focus on CE vendors or broadcaster issues, not on users.

The broadcast industry is still trying to control subscribers with standards; at best this can be moderately successful. The CE industry has not got its act together at all with a jungle of competing connected TV environments. The promise is too big for any of them to turn back just yet.

So if the time is indeed ripe for an “iPod moment” determined by the end user, will it be Apple’s whose interest is the TV remains a bit opaque? Or maybe another it could be another Internet big-gun like Google or Microsoft?

My bet would rather be on Netflix. If they steer clear of the torpedoes currently being launched at them from several directions, they could follow in Google’s tracks. Netflix could move from a best-in-class service to deploying an underlying technology (like Google did with Android). Connecting the TV and the Web is not an objective in its own right, but inventing lean-back V2.0 (or veg 2.0 as Anthony Rose put’s it) is. Content recommendation & navigation has to be part of the solution, so if Netflix isn’t the one, it’ll be someone else with outstanding content navigation that will deliver they connected TV’s “iPod moment”.

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Connected TV panel: “Is Internet delivery the future for all TV?”

Here is the Video of the panel I chaired during Connected TV Summit this May in London.

Click here

If you patient enough some interesting price data comes out. I ask the question minute 13:30, by minute 16:30 actual figures come out at 5p per GB for large-scale operators like Lovefilm, BBC would pay probably only half of that ...

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Summing the IP&TV World Forum 2011 up with two letters: O & T, then looking at it from three angles: content, technology & operators.

I was expecting Over-the-top to be a prevalent theme, but not to swamp the whole conference the way it did. From the few conference talks I attended, right from the OTT Forum breakfast to Netflix’s keynote on the last day OTT was in everyone’s slides. Then on the exhibition floor there wasn’t a booth that didn’t have the precious two letters somewhere on a wall or at last in the literature.

OTT is a totally different proposition depending on which angle you take. My company is called CTO innovation Consulting, because we strive to work withall three of Content owners, Technology providers and Network Operators. So lets have a look at those three angles.

For Content owners like Hollywood studios, OTT is just another channel. In an ideal world it should represent only potential, but as Hulu pointed out at the conference, it could imply reduced margins, and if it kills off other channels it’s generally bad news. The typical knee-jerk way to fight back is to go direct to the consumer so that if there is a smaller cake to share, there are less people to share it with. Knees can jerk incredibly fast, but not much thought goes into the process.

Technology providers are eagerly rubbing their hands together in anticipation of selling new solutions. A few of the industry top guns like Apple & Google are actually changing landscape. But for the rest, be it small start-ups like the army of Connected-TV specialists, larger appliance suppliers such as encoding companies like Harmonic or Envivio, software suppliers like Adobe and even Microsoft or even OTT pure players like TVinci or Capablue it’s just one huge sales bandwagon to get on.

Now for the hardest part: Network Operators. During time of rapid broadband penetration (almost 10 years ago in developed markets, around now in emerging ones), however creative the marketers, the key selling feature has always been “as big a pipe as possible for a small a subscription as possible”. Then, as markets mature the issue becomes one of climbing up the value chain, adding value: being more than just a dumb bit pipe. OTT is a double-edged sword in this respect. It lets network operators easily access third party services and dress them up in their own colours, but it also means any other service is just a click away. This is where the Net neutrality debate comes in and it was amazingly absent from the IP&TV World forum discussions. As if the whole industry had its head in the sand. I didn’t hear a single mention of the big US operators recent decision put caps on existing data plans.

If the hype keeps up, you can expect the show to soon be rebranded OTT World forum.
I’ll be writing up my discussions on some of the booths from next week.

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My plans for IP&TV World Forum 2011

Like many attendees, this year I’ll be wearing several different hats again during the show. I’ll start as a blogger and a bit of a twit (@nebul2), then put on the independent expert & analyst attire. I shall finish off the conference wearing my active IP&TV / VoD consultant’s hat.

On the exhibition floor, I’ll be milling around and peeking at everything. Last year was notable for the fancy UI demos based on Intel chipsets. This year I expect the other chipset vendors to respond. So I’m looking forward to Sigma Design’s G.hn demos and whatever is new from ST and co. I trust Pace, ADB and the other STB makers will oblige.

I’m proud to have got my 3D prediction right: last year was too early for the 3D bonanza, and it looks like this year is already late enough to avoid it again, so I don't expect to waste much more time looking at puny 3D demos.

Last year’s OTT and connected TV demos were still mostly just concepts despite several of them having already been around in 2009, but I expect to see more live services demoed this year. I’ll be especially attentive to any booths that are showing OTT services that, beyond looking desirable to the end-user, make business sense. I suppose a holy grail while going from OTT demo to OTT demo will be anything that looks like it could become a connected TV Esperanto, but that’s probably just wishful thinking; I must save some expectations for 2012’s show.

Now for the conference.
Day one: I’ll head off to the OTT breakfast hosted by an interesting ecosystem of companies, three of which I often write about. For OTT to make a difference, cooperation is central that’s why I find this initiative interesting.
Awox’s Olivier Carmona is technical marketing director of a small company with a big vision that dared to nail its colours to the DLNA mast way before it was hip.
I’m looking forward to a scheduled interview with Steve Christian of Verimatrix.
Unlike most competitors in the security business who still only really care about today’s CAS cows, Steve also gets fired up about what’s coming. He often leaves me with a “why didn’t I think of that” feeling.
Next comes Thierry Fautier who is Harmonic’s IP convergence guy. His forceful views on the way the industry is heading always take me by surprise.
Then I’m looking forward to getting the views of Minerva, Real & Heavy Reading whom I know less well but will be there too.

Thus I’ll miss the opening keynote plenary. The main conference room is usually packed with journalists so if anything interesting comes out of those presentations I’ll pick it up on twitter (@julianclover usually tweets if its really breaking news so I recommend following him as well as the #iptvwf hash tag). The only operator in the opening session is Virgin Media. IP&TV WF still has this bizarre UK focus on keynotes in spite of the fact that this is supposed to be a WORLD forum and that the UK is a long way from the centre of the IP&TV universe. As an expat Brit, I can’t help wondering if it’s an unconscious remnant of the British empire: when my Austrian grandparents got married in the 20s, they went to the centre of the world for their honeymoon, it was Nelson’s column. But that was almost a century ago.

Anyway, back to IPTV, I’ll then spend the rest of day one between the 4 conference streams and the exhibition floor.
As I’ve always been fascinated how marketing genius creates brands like Häagen-Dazs or Red Bull out of absolutely nothing, I’ll try and get to the Red Bull presentation at 3:10 in the Content stream.

Wednesday morning’s plenary seems more promising with speakers from both YouView and HbbTV, so I’ll be looking forward to some sparks flying there and a debate beyond the confines of the UK market.
If I still have fee time in the morning, I’ll be going to the Network optimisation stream, which is about adaptive rate streaming, one of my hobby horses from 2008. Huw Price-Stephens, the stream chair is probably the best chairman I’ve seen at IP&TV WF. He’s witty and provocative, so even when the speakers disappoint, he raises the standard. I’ll certainly be staying in his stream later in the afternoon, as a panellist at 15:10 on video delivery for the last mile.

I don’t know if that’s a demotion or a promotion, but for the first time, I’m not invited to the awards ceremony, which is held this year at the end of day 2. I never like Madame Tussaud’s and in any case I’ll be going to an exclusive Warner & Grey Juice screening that evening instead.

Day three will kick off for me at 8AM as I’m hosting an analyst breakfast on the commoditization of IPTV. So far we’ve had an exciting LinkedIn debate with 60 contributions so far. It came in response to a blog on the death of IPTV in France that I published on my site.
Then for much of the last day I’ll be wearing a consultant’s hat talking to clients.
I’m not too worried about missing the Google & Netflix talks during the plenary session. I’ve only ever been disappointed when listening to these big guns. Note that that may be because my expectations are set wrongly.
I’ll try and catch some of the CDN stream, which focuses on where operators are either in pain or see opportunity today as opposed to yesterday or tomorrow for the other streams.
IPTV WF have had to fight so hard to get credible speakers from the network operators (I remember being one of the first in 2004 or 2005), that now the pendulum has swung the other way: in the whole day on CDN’s almost all speakers are network operators. I’ll make a point of trying to attend the presentation from Astro, the Malaysian DTH platform at 3:30. It’s always better to start by understanding the market needs before the offers.

Then it’ll be a rush back to St Pancras station to catch a Eurostar, and hopefully write up some notes to publish here on the journey home.

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Contrasted feelings, unpacking my Apple TV II

Just to set the scene, I’ve only been an Apple User for just over 2 years, so I still feel pretty novice: my love/hate relation with Apple products still oscillates widely from just loving the way it all works out-of-the-box to really hating how boxed-in it makes me feel. Apple TV II consolidated that that duality of feeling.

The biggest thrill with Apple products is usually unpacking it, and just switching it one WITHOUT reading any manual EVER.

This time, the packaging was merely OK: I felt a bit disappointed, as Apple had raised my expectations from previous products starting with an iPod in 2004 that really blew my mind. Even the little box my iPhone 4 came was so cute that my son asked my to keep it to decorate his room. Apple TV’s box has already been thrown out.

The switching-on ceremony however did stand up to expectations.

Only 10 seconds after having plugged in the power, Ethernet and HDMI cables, I was browsing through movies on my 46” LCD. Admitedly not everyone may have a spare Ethernet cable right next the TV, so I wonder how much more it would of cost Apple to through Wifi in [oops correction: there of course if Wifi, thanks Graham].

But back to those first few seconds. As usual the shear simplicity of the user interface is astounding. I just don’t get it: Why oh why are thre so many more buttons on other remote controls.

The only traditional TV player to have tried something like this (i.e. a 6 button remote) is NDS with Snowflake and they’ve been demoing for years – the situation must be dire to the extent they felt the need to recently release a press statement about some small operator in a very small market planning to launch with it.

Something counterintuitive is happening here, and I still don’t understand. I feel no doubt at all in my guts that this navigational paradigm is superior, yet the market is saying something else. Either one of us is wrong, or I’m missing something. Please comment if you have any ideas on this.

Back to Apple TV itself again, beyond being intuitive it is also kind of fun. Streaming isn’t yet rate-adaptive so when you ask to watch a trailer it takes a while to buffer, but that's only a few seconds for me, as I live in the city with a decent DSL connection, but I would guess means the AppleTV isn’t really much fun if you don’t have at least 3 or 4 spare megabits.

From a content perspective, I haven’t done a proper analysis of what studios are represented in which proportion (I do that when I’m paid by clients hint hint), but the overall impression is that for the French market at least, is that iTunes really has got a critical mass of exciting blockbuster stuff. There were scores of movies I’d like to see. What I know is once I’ve seen those, how fast does it refresh … time will tell.

Moving to the Internet section I was dazzled by the ease of linking to my Flickr account (nebul2, my photos are public). But frustrated that the mobile.me connection didn’t work – very un-apple to have such a overt bug with no clear error message.

Linking computers was as easy as pie, but epitomised the duality of Apple. The light side of the force was that very ease: just share stuff on you computers WITH iTunes software … and it appears seamlessly on you TV. But the dark side of the force is just there: iTunes or be damned.

Things got even more contrasted when I tried the all-new AirPlay. Again from within iTunes on my Mac or indeed my iPhone, it was fantastic. But even on the Mac you can’t use any other software (maybe I missed something, but why are photos easy to send from the iPhone to Apple TV but not from iPhoto on the Mac?!?). I’ve always felt I understood the “walled garden” expression, but actually I hadn’t. Incumbent Telcos or restrictive mobile operators feel like Wikileaks compared to using AirPlay. It’s a step too far for me in Apple-only land.

I bought a brand new MacBook Air, at around the same time Apple introduced the Apstore to the Mac. << Don’t just download stuff from the Internet, [imagine the snake from the Jungle book saying this next part] trusssst in me, I’m Apple, I’ll let only get the besssst sssoftware that I have persssssonaly checked (and taken a cut from).>>

I again feel torn apart by the beauty of my new toy and the way its closing down into a scary world of big-brother Apple.

But here it must be that I’m just too old-fashioned. For my kids, the open Internet is reverting back to what it broke out of when the Compuserve’s of the world represented a walled-garden Internet.

Maybe Apple is just showing us a way back to the future, but I hope not, I love Apple but it’s getting harder to swallow, and yes you’ve guessed where this is going: I don’t want to end up like Adam.

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A propos

La Technologie permet aux Opérateurs de réseaux de s’investir dans de nouveaux services IP à base de Contenus.

Certains opérateurs de contenus doivent survivre dans cet environnement qui leur semble menaçant alors que de nouveaux entrants commencent déjà à prendre position.
La mission de CTO innovation Consulting est d’aider ses clients à apporter ou à contribuer à une réelle qualité d’expérience pour l’utilisateur final dans cet écosystème de convergence.

Prestations :

  • Etude d’opportunité
  • Création / consolidation / validation de business plan
  • Assistance RFI/RFP côté client et fournisseur
  • Audit et suivi de projets
  • Qualité d’Expérience
  • Audit, benchmark et management
  • Analyse et gestion de risques
  • Assistance MOA

Notre domaine d’expertise couvre l’espace de la convergence avec une spécialisation dans l’ensemble des technologies requises pour l’IPTV, les moteurs de recherche, la vidéo et la musique.