Distribution

The new digital ways content was becoming distributed

IPTV Growth To Boost Video Market To $277Bn By 2010: iSupply
Research house iSupply are predicting that IPTV will be boosting the reveneue generated by the premium video services market from its current level of less than $200Bn to a whopping $277Bn by 2010.
Their definition of the premium video services market takes in pay-TV, mobile video, DVD, broadband video and theatre/box office receipts, but when advertising revenues are added, the total market reaches a stunning $370Bn.
iSupply see IPTV growing at frankly amazing rates. In 2005 they saw IPTV worth $681m and, with their estimate of a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 103 percent (!), see it reaching a calculator-busting £23.5Bn in 2010.
It appears that they see the public’s willingness to pay for content expanding significantly. Strange, but we and our other tech-aware pals are finding ourselves just not watching that much mainstream content – even if it is available on-demand.
That aside, iSupply see the battle royal between two big, hairy beasts – the current pay-TV world of direct-to-home satellite and digital and analogue cable TV services – and the telcos who will be pushing quad-play.
On the physical format side, iSupply point out that DVD sales are slowing, and will continue to do so, with the decline over the next 3-4 years being as much as 15 percent to 20 percent.
One very interesting point that is raised by them is
With most movie libraries and television series already on DVD, Hollywood studios are generating more than half of their revenues from DVDs—and are running out of new content to sell, making this an issue of paramount importance to them. One cause of the DVD sales deceleration is the fact that consumers have become more price-sensitive, believing that the average DVD cost of $20 is too expensive, especially compared to renting.
It’s not clear where this leaves Blu-Ray and HD-DVD – both on the price of the media (which is expected to be higher than DVD) and on the material that is available. Given Hollywood’s slow ability to make new material, and that most of it will have been sold on DVD already – it’s not clear if the new formats will help them.
Information on Premium Video Services Market report
1 March, 2007
Kendra Initiative Cross-Media Summit for Content Discovery
The Kendra Initiative is hosting a Cross-Media Summit about Content Delivery next week, on Friday 9th March in London.
The full day event, running at the Frontline Club, is billed as “The Strategy, Technology and Business Case for Content Description, Visibility, Search and Discovery.”
The event is aiming to tackle one of Digital-Lifestyles hobby horses – In a sea of infinite content, how do you, as a willing content consumer, locate the content you want to use? As Peter Buckingham, Head Of Distribution and Exhibition, UK Film Council puts it, “The biggest threat is obscurity.”
The approach of this free-to-attend event is from the content owners perspective, looking at what is the weakness of current metadata standards; if they can be adapted to work better; if not, what is the appetite for more metadata standards for cross-media description?
Metadata standard are all very well, but often live within a bubble of non-implementation. The need for metadata-creation tools and how to persuade the industry to use them will also be covered.
We spoke to Daniel Harris (mug shot above), founder of Kendra, “It’s all about making things work, making the open marketplace work together. We’re really pleased to see how many people are coming along to it, creating a universal meta data.”
“As with all industries that involve connecting people, some people [involved in this] gain from there being a problem, but people are seeing that they can work outside their industry sector. This is a cross-industry problem that we’re trying to solve.”
So far around fifty people have signed up including representatives from important players such as Patrick Attallah, CEO, ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number); Keith Hill, Head of R&D, MCPS-PRS Alliance; Mark Stuart, Principal Engineer, Pioneer Digital Design; Iain McNay, Board Member, AIM (Association of Independent Music) and Chairman, Cherry Red Records; Rich Lappenbusch, Director, Microsoft Entertainment and Board Member, DDEX (Digital Data Exchange).
Being tech driven, those not able to physically attend will be able to hook in via Instant messaging and Skype.
The event will be free and sponsored by Makeni.
Kendra Initiative Cross-Media Summit for Content Discovery
1 March, 2007
BBC Say Yes (Probably) to FreeSat
The BBC have been talking about launching a free satellite service since before 2004. Very cleverly they labelled it Freesat.
Since then, we’ve returned to it a number of times, as it appeared to drop from the general BBC conversation.
Well it’s back in the news now, as the BBC Trust has reached a provisional decision on Freesat. Their view is one of support and have opened a 28 day public consultation prior to making its final decision in April 2007.
They foresee the satellite being shared among the UK broadcasters and guarantee that it will remain free after a one-off initial payment to cover the cost of equipment and installation.
There are problems with the much-trumpeted digital switch-over in the UK. Many areas are not covered by the digital transmitters because they are located in a remote area or that the geography of the area blocks the transmissions – in fact over half of those yet to switch (3.5 million homes) fall outside the Freeview coverage area. Satellite-delivered services do not suffer from these problems.
To date BSkyB has been the only company offering satellite delivery in the UK, indeed the BBC is carried on it. The proposal of FreeSat isn’t without impact.
As Acting BBC Chairman Chitra Bharucha put it, “We have considered the market impact and whilst there may be some negative effects, in our view these should be balanced against the potential positive market impact of greater choice. Overall, we believe a “Freesat” service to be in the public interest and we hope that other public service broadcasters would join the BBC in a joint venture.”
There’s additional benefits beyond coverage, that of delivery of HD signals, which currently it isn’t practical to do countrywide over Freeview.
Those wishing to comment should get over to the public consultation.
28 February, 2007
It’s A Wild, Wild, Wi-Fi World
New figures from a US survey by Pew Internet Project reveal that cables are becoming, like, soooo 1990s as more and more people connect to the internet via wireless connections.
The study, released yesterday, shows that some 34% of internet users have surfed the web or checked email on a computer or smartphone/PDA using a Wi-Fi connection or mobile phone network.
Wi-Fi In The House
Wi-Fi is also proving a hit in the home, with nearly 20 percent of US Internet users now having domestic wireless networks – up a hefty 100% from the same time two years ago.
“We know that ‘always on’ broadband connections really deepen people’s relationship to the Internet; adding ‘on the go’ to the mix takes this a step further,” commented John Horrigan, associate research director at Pew.
“The convenience of wireless access gives people the chance to fire off a quick e-mail to someone while waiting in a doctor’s office or check the news headlines on the way to work,” he added.
The figures show that wireless folks are more addicted to email than other web users, with 72% checking their email ‘on a typical day’ compared to 63% of home broadband users and 54% of all internet users.
They’re news junkies too, with nearly half (46%) going online to read news compared to 38% of home broadband users and 31% of all internet users.
Of course, these figures should be taken with a Table Mountain of salt, because it’s ruddy obvious that someone who relies on mobile email for work is going to be using wireless connections more often than your average home user.
Where they connect
The report looked at where people hook up wirelessly and found that the majority (27%) log on in web cafes or other non- work/home environments.
Some 20% of internet users said that they’ve gone online wirelessly at home with 17% connecting at work. Naturally, there’s a fair bit of overlap, with people connecting at two or three of the places above.
It’s a shame the survey didn’t ask how many were hooking up to free networks and how many were grabbing a sneaky piggyback ride on other folks’ unprotected connections, though.
But there’s lots more analysis of varying interest here: Pew Internet (PDF)
26 February, 2007
Sky To Pull Channels From Virgin Media: Offering Discounts
The spat between Virgin Media and Mr Murdoch’s Sky TV is getting uglier as Sky threatens to pull its Sky One, Two, Three, News and Sports News channels from Virgin Media at the end of the month.
The frost started back in November last year when Virgin’s Richard Branson complained about Sky buying a £940m holding in the UK broadcaster, ITV. Branson jumped up and down and generally said how unfair it was.
A week ago Sky said it was considering a formal complaint against Virgin Media’s latest advertising campaign, which stated, “The cheapest place to get Sky Sports isn’t Sky.” Sky refuted Virgin’s claims, saying they were misleading.
Today sees the latest round. Virgin put out a statement this morning saying that they anticipated “a withdrawal of these channels by Sky at the end of February.”
Clearly angry, the statement continued,
“The nature of these negotiations leads us to believe that this outcome has been deliberately engineered by Sky in order to suppress competition and coerce Virgin Media’s customers into switching to its service by denying them access to the basic channels. (These negotiations do not impact Sky’s premium sports and movies channels which will continue to be available to Virgin Media customers.)
This view is reinforced by Sky’s decision to broadcast, at the height of negotiations on 12th February, a series of promotions claiming that the channels were about to disappear from Virgin Media’s network. This was nothing more than a heavy-handed attempt to exert undue influence on the negotiating process.”
Virgin Media claim that Sky has been asking for “a carriage fee more than double the existing arrangement.”
Julian Closer is reporting that Virgin will be offering up to £9.75 in compensation for the loss of Sky-branded channels.
23 February, 2007
XBox 360 IPTV Coming To London
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 running as an IPTV box will be demonstrated in London for the first time in Europe on 5 March.
It’s had an outing at CES in January this year and was well received.
There’s little doubt that the X360 has the grunt to be able to act as an IPTV STB – if anything it’s total over kill, given the considerable graphics ability it has.
Here’s what Robbie Bach, Sr. VP and Chief Xbox Officer, said about IPTV Edition, the middleware that the network operator will run to power the IPTV-ness of the Xbox 360, “IPTV Edition enables you to do, regardless of whether you’re a cable provider or a telco or any net operator, you can take live media, on-demand media, across an IP network and put it into the home on a high-definition television, and you can do multiple streams of that content without having to have multiple tuners in the set-top box. You really can produce an amazing TV experience.”
He went on to explain it’s not just about selling the IPTV software to the head-end, “this product sells SQL Server, it sells Commerce Server, it sells the rest of our backbone into these operators, and really helps broaden our business.” Hmmm, Nice.
It’s also been on what they call “scale commercial deployments” with the BT Group in the UK, Deutsche Telekom in Germany, T-Online in France and Swisscom in Switzerland. AT&T is working with Microsoft in the US.
There’s a history here
When the original Xbox was launched, Microsoft spent an awful amount of effort in denying that it was a going to be used to bring them closer to the TV in the lounge.
Despite this, they did quietly release some add-on software package that allowed you to pull picture and music from a PC. We bought it to give it a go, and found it to be disastrous. Hugely bloated software that needed to loaded on the PC that was to share and disastrous software that loaded on the Xbox. It was rare that it worked at all.
We assume that the X360 is considerably better than this.
The US version of XBox Live already gives subscribers the ability to download films and TV programmes to their X360s.
22 February, 2007
DigiTV: The Progress So Far
Guy Giles gives us an update on how the DigiTV project is coming along. DigiTV assists Local Authorities to understand, launch and run citizen-focused services on digital TV and mobile phones.
2007 has started at quite a pace for DigiTV. We have seen unprecedented growth in usage traffic following the introduction of a new job search plugin from Job Centre Plus.
This can be used by any organisation signing up to using the Starter Kit and is proving to be a service which really does drive repeat traffic. Given the audience for an interactive television service (primarily C2, D & E) this is providing a service driven by genuine need from people who often do not have routine access to a PC at home.
In a recent piece of research, one of the users of the system sent in a request for a council form. When followed up she explained that she was awake in the middle of the night supporting her autistic son. She needed to contact the council but without a PC or PC skills to call on – she turned to the television for service.
Digital television is really proving to be a platform that is reaching an audience that has been left out of the digital loop for too long.
Another new development sees Wychavon’s choice-based lettings service go live via the DigiTV Starter Kit. Wychavon undertook some research to see where and when the traffic arrived on their Web-based service each week. It turned out that parents were having to ask their children to login at school to enable them to bid for the property of their choice. Parents did not have the benefit of having a PC at home so had to rely on their children. By making this service available on TV – it really does open up the service to all and start to address the very real social and economic disadvantages that come with digital exclusion.
This month we are pleased to bring two new London local authorities on board. Both Islington and Kensington & Chelsea have signed up for the service and will see their sites go live before the end of March.
They have both opted for the ‘bureau’ service which sees the DigiTV team build their sites for them based on a set of templated services/interactions that are available. Its great to see more of London engaging with this service given the high takeup of digital television in the capital.
Finally, its worth keeping in mind the pace of change in the UK television market. All platforms are going to being using broadband to deliver a wide range of additional interactive and on-demand services and people from all walks of life will increasingly expect to use any ‘screen’ in their home to access these. We encourage all Local Authorities that now is the time to engage with this to ensure that they meet expectations in the future whilst ensuring that they provide a service now to the digitally excluded and socially disadvantaged.
DigiTV
22 February, 2007
Beardy Big Cheese At Google Predicts Internet Growth Driven By Mobiles
One of the big cheeses at Google, vice president and chief ‘Internet evangelist’ (say wah’?!) Vinton G. Cerf has been shining up his crystal ball and coming up with his predictions for the future.
Looking deeper, deeper, deeper into his shiny orb (oo-er), the beardy Cerf revealed that it won’t be personal computers fuelling the growth of the internet. Instead he reckons that the expansion of the worldwide web will be powered by mobile phones, with countries like India snapping up zillions of the fellas and getting online en masse.
Talking to Yahoo, Cerf whipped out his Big Book of Internet Facts (BBOIF) and observed that the amount of people accessing the web has expanded quicker than Fatty Arbuckle’s waistband at a pie eating contest, with the numbers soaring from just 50 million in 1997 to nearly 1.1 billion today.
Despite this, the web still only reaches a miserly sixth of the world’s population, prompting Cerf to comment, “You will get those other 5.5 billion people only when affordability increases and the cost of communication goes down.”
“The mobile phone has become an important factor in the Internet revolution,” he added.
Flicking further through his BBOIF, Cerf said that there are 2.5 billion mobile-phone users worldwide with numbers rocketing in developing countries led by China and India.
India is already adding seven million mobile-phone users a month – enough to tempt British telecom giant Vodafone to shell out over $11 billion dollars for a controlling stake in local mobile outfit Hutch-Essar – with new Internet-enabled features and services likely to reel in more online users.
Naturally, Google wants a slab o’the action, and has been expanding its research and service offices in India, hoping to increase the current meagre total of just 40 million people online – just 3.5 percent of India’s enormous population.
Via
20 February, 2007
Virgin ‘iTunes for Games’ Announced
Virgin have announced their intention to create an iTunes for Games. The service, to be called, A World Of My Own, will offer video games for download.
As with the majority of The Bearded One’s businesses, this is a partnership with another company, in this case, Game Domain International, who will be providing the technical know-how. The marketing and sizzle will come from Virgin.
They’ve decided to abbreviate A World Of My Own, AWOMO.
Knowledge of their intentions dates back to June last year.
Downloading games isn’t new. Services like Steam have been working since 2004, but while these services have appealed to the hard-core of gaming, they’ve never really broken out to the general public.
Virgin chucking their marketing muscle behind is likely to change that. Beyond that there’s the great cross promotional opportunities, between Virgin Media (NTL/Telewest cable as was) and even their airlines.
AWOMO are taking a different approach to the plain-looking Steam, as the environment will be 3D, with different areas – think Second Life meets games distribution.
We hear that the Koch Media Group, Europe’s largest PC games distributor who work with major brands such as EA, Ubisoft and Deep Silver are in discussions with Virgin about the service.
Virgin used to be pretty big in games during the BBC Micro days, but fell out of love with it and sold it all off before the ’90’s got going.
It’s planned that the service will start in March this year. Let’s just hope they come up with a better moniker than AWOMO.
A World Of My Own
14 February, 2007
Vodafone And Orange 3G RAN Share: Examined
As has been mentioned on Digital-Lifestyles, Orange and Vodafone have entered into an agreement to share their 3G Radio Access Network (or RAN). We thought you’d appreciate some more depth … and who better to give it than Steve Kennedy, our telco guru.
Currently Vodafone have a bigger network than Orange, so Orange would gain more than Vodafone from the deal, but in future it means that new cell sites will be used by both operators.
The agreement could have covered 2G (GSM) too, but as Vodafone use 900MHz systems and Orange use different systems operating in the 1800MHz band, it just not possible. That said, it’s likely future technology would allow both sets of frequencies to operate within the same radio equipment.
There will still be interesting problems to sort out for 3G sharing, as Vodafone exclusively use equipment from Ericsson, while Orange use equipment from Nortel, Siemens, Nokia and Alcatel.
Once the network is in place, each network will be responsible for enabling their own network services and ensuring quality of service, etc. As competition for customers increases this is a sensible way for operators to reduce cost, share the infrastructure and compete on service. It’s a shame the fixed networks don’t take this view, as has been pointed out before, the LLU operators could join forces and build a joint LLU network and then compete on service. This might give them a larger network, which would be of a size and scale to compete with BT’s upcoming 21CN.
Why the rush to build?
With a 3G license comes obligations and one of these was to reach 80% of the population by the 1st Dec, 2007. Though the GSM network coverage hit that a while ago, 3G expansion has been slower with few customers really wanting 3G services so the operators have built 3G networks in densely populated areas where they can make revenue from those customers. That means big cities have been covered, but elsewhere 3G coverage is patchy to say the least.
Hutchinson 3G (or 3 the new entrant into the mobile world) has been rapidly building its customer base and building a network to match. In June 2004, Ofcom tried rules that 3 had SMP (significant market power) in the 3G world, which meant it would be regulated by Ofcom much in the same way BT is for fixed networks. The other 3G operators happily supported Ofcom in this view. 3 didn’t want the increased regulatory burden and disagreed with Ofcom’s ruling, so appealed to the Competition Appeal Tribunal. They won their appeal in November 2005. This was the first time any network has successfully appealed against a SMP designation.
3 wasn’t happy about having SMP forced upon it and therefore made noises to Ofcom about coverage obligations, which the other networks weren’t meeting. They’ve got 10 months to hit that 80% figure.
Though city centres might have a demand for 3G (for data services, no one cares about 3G voice – a voice call sounds the same whether it’s 3G or GSM), as you leave dense urban areas the appeal of 3G is less. Well maybe not less, but there are less people to use it and less of a reason for the networks to install 3G infrastructure and sites.
The cost of a 3G cell is probably not much different in terms of equipment from that of a 2G cell, one major difference is the amount of bandwidth needed for the cell, as data volumes are significantly higher (maybe 40Kb/s using GPRS data compared to maybe 2Mb/s for 3G, multiply that by 10 users and it’s 400Kb/s compared to 200Mb/s).
UK backhaul (i.e. the pipes used to connect cells) are expensive. The more rural the cell site is. the less chance there is that anyone (except maybe BT) has got any kind of high bandwidth connectivity. Therefore, the costs of the backhaul may well exceed that of the cell site itself.
Sharing makes economic sense
Orange and Vodafone have to hit that 80% figure or Ofcom can impose fines which could be significant. Therefore the build out of a shared new network makes economic sense. It’s half of what they’d each have to pay.
In this climate of everyone’s customers wanting everything for nothing, being able to reduce your build costs may well be the straw that doesn’t break the camel’s back.
9 February, 2007