Simplicity and reliability was the theme of Ryan Tupper’s presentation at IP Possibilities. In his talk, Tupper described how Innovative Systems consolidates disparate service features, such as unified messaging, on-demand conferencing and IPTV middleware into one box, the APMAX. In this video interview, Tupper demonstrates a couple of features embedded in the APMAX; one which allows a telco’s CSR to remotely control and monitor a customer’s set-top and another feature which allows one click creation of reports for content providers.
Posts Tagged iptv
Voice narration isn’t necessary to make the point of this two minute video as it notes the progression of IP in telecom and the progression of Video and TV over the Net. IP displaced ATM in an industry that would have said "no way" ten years ago. And now, Video and Television over the Net have progressed to a point where few are questioning or doubting, but many are jumping on the band wagon to provide products and service.
IPTV took a bit of a hit in December 2008 when SES announced it was backing out. Yet, at that same time, Vudu announced the addition of Web to TV episodes to it’s service. LG announced a box for Netflix movies delivered over the Net to the television, and then announced a TV that didn’t need a box. Roku and VuNow also have a box for video to the TV while XBox, Playstation, and Wi already do Internet video on the TV, and then Ninetendo announced an Internet channel that struck fear in the Japanese TV industry.
Even before these Internet to TV boxes came along, there was writing on the wall with the aggregation of network, studio, and film content. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Comedy Central, Disney, and many others have been streaming programs over the net for quite some time. It was a logical progression for companies like Hulu, Boxee, and even TV Guide to aggregate.
The missing link for television video on the net, and the aggregation of that content, for watching on the TV, was a box. Today there are many with many more likely to show up in 2009. My conclusion in the video above is that operators need to learn more about these activities by watching, uploading video content and experimenting, learning to create video playlists, and embedding customized players on a website. The tools for learning are free – YouTube, BlipTV, Revver, Metacafe, Facebook, and the many others – so it seems very logical that using these, and observing will help realize how to partner in these ventures.
ViodiTV has been posting video’s for the past 6 years and learned many things by expermenting. We’ve learned what’s good and bad about various services, about generating ad revenue through new avenues, about creating playlists for linear on demand viewing, and customizing players to embed on a website. We’ve learned why CDN’s are important for video, and about many start-ups and stealths at various conference that focus on video over the net.
To use an abstract analogy I’d conclude with the phrase… In 2008 "Wii" got "Fit" on TV; In 2009 TV is getting Fit for Us. I also want to point out that the music in this video is Creative Commons License 
downloaded from ccMixter.org. "Pulsing Piano Bit for Goodby December" by Kaer Trouz.
ViodiTV at TelcoTV 2008
Nov 14
Roger Bindl reports on interesting under-tone or evolving trends with IPTV. Coverage includes Mark Carpenter of Pannaway, with revenue generating ideas that kick off this tone. Kurt Scherf, Parks Associates, explains how his workshop expanded on integration of over-the-top (OTT). Edward Lichty of Vudu gives the perspective of an OTT service provider. Paul Scanlan, MobiTV, expands on this idea of video over the top. Steve Tanter, NDS, provides an example of a whole home network application and Marty Roberts of thePlatform wraps up with thoughts on advertising.
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A high level overview of CableNEXT 2007 in Santa Clara with Roger Bindl and Ken Pyle. This 3 day conference featured a keynote speech by Tony Werner of Comcast who suggested that Cloud Computing could be a significant game changer.
contact Peter at peter at viodi dot com.
BTC Broadband sees its role as a technology leader dedicated to providing leading edge services to its community. Aggressively pursuing that path, it has launched one of the first 100%, MPEG4-based, subscription video services in the USA. The CEO of BTC, Lynn Pike, gave the Viodi View some valuable insights into the development and launch of BTC TV.
Viodi View asked Lynn what drove BTC to pioneer such an early push to MPEG4. The answers were clear. Taking a strong position against competition from Cox required a high level of video service, and going the MPEG2 route would require upgrading to MPEG 4 before achieving pay off of the MPEG2 gear.
I also wanted to know how long the process took. Lynn confided that "It took us almost 24 months, primarily due to the middleware and STB development. If we were to start today I would estimate only 12-18 months with the gating item being content contracts." Content availability will only improve as and when more MPEG4 oriented turnkey providers hit the market.
BTC teamed with Conklin-Intracom to build the infrastructure, and launched with over 145 basic and premium channels. Added features, including various flavors of PVR, network and STB based, will begin rolling out in December.
Lynn also offered some advice to other IOCs heading down this road. "Always allow more time than expected." Product roadmaps and delivery dates are still uncertain at this stage of any technology roll out and vendor support is critical.
"Twenty to thirty year old copper OSP is great for voice frequency, fair for DSL and really unfriendly to IPTV data rates. Figure on cleaning up 25 -30% of your pairs before you can deploy TV. You will find corrosion, bridge taps, load coils, moisture in splice closures, poor splice connections, and woe to you if you have paper cable …. Shorten your loops to under 9000′ – 5000′ is better."
So, how about the future? In answer to questions of bandwidth availability and consumption in the longer term, Lynn noted some concerns. He strongly supported increased fiber deployment. "….build green fields with fiber, overbuild with fiber while settlements are still available…." and looks forward to vendors expanding the bandwidth capacity of copper. "We will need 30 to 40 megs for HD, VOD and multiple streams."
Viodi will keep up with BTC’s progress, and give readers insight into the successes and roadblocks that BTC will encounter on their way to offering PVRs, HD and other video services to their community.
Quality of Experience
Nov 6
New Local Content Workshops Are Forming
Quality of Experience is a term that has received some buzz over the past year. As IPTV deployments have matured the importance of operations and customer care have increased. Curtis Howe, President of Mariner Partners, talks about what Quality of Experience means in this impromptu interview at TelcoTV. Howe’s background is perfect for this as he was involved in some of the first IPTV deployments.
Drinking from a firehose; that is the feeling I get after attending a Parks Associates conference, particularly one of their focused seminars like the Digital Lifestyle seminar held on October 3 in Santa Clara. Read on to learn more about conference that covered everything from IPTV to home networking in the U.S, as well as Europe and Asia.
Kurt Scherf, Vice President and Principal Analyst for Parks Associates, gave a very nuanced definition for the various classifications of video services, from pure IPTV on one end to Broadband Video/Over the Top on the other extreme. As has been suggested by many independent telcos, Scherf indicated the motivation for telcos adding video is to retain the customer as he eloquently put it when he said, “if you lose the landline connection, you lose the lifeline.”
From a Media Adaptor category, Europe is quite interesting to Scherf, as providers there are giving away the adaptors for their hybrid direct terrestrial/IP offerings. The approach operators are taking in the European markets is to sell the value first and then offer differentiation. Interestingly, southern Europeans are much more receptive to paying for video and content on demand than the rest of Europe.
On-demand will be the primary interactive television service for which people are willing to pay. Scherf suggested that other types of interactive services, like Caller I.D. on TV, might also be popular. It is an art form for the operator to determine which services they can explicitly charge for and which should be bundled into service packages. Scherf was bullish on the home network and he cited Verizon’s success in selling 12% of its FiOS video customers on a $19.95 month multi-room DVR product. Scherf suggested that a, “Home network or home computer service will be the first thing that becomes a killer application.”
Culture plays into the adoption of new technology, according to John Barrett, Director of Research for Parks Associates. In Japan for instance, home computing is not as popular as say the U.S., because of the long commute (presumably spending time on the PC is too taxing after a long day of work and commute). In Taiwan, the computer is much more of an entertainment-centric device than in the U.S., which tends towards the television for entertainment. China has the largest revenue in online video downloads at more than $70 Million per month, compared to $40 Million per month for the U.S.
How much people are willing to pay for content varies from country to country and how they are willing to pay varies. For instance, people in China, France and Italy are much more likely to embrace free content in exchange for advertising than in other countries. Even the location where people watch content varies from country to country, with people in most markets tending for the social experience of theaters to view movies, while Americans are tending towards cocooning with their DVDs in their home theaters.
“$300 a Penguin,” is what Michael Cai, Director of Broadband and Gaming for Parks Associates, calculated the owners of the online virtual world/game, Club Penguin will receive if they meet all of the milestones as part of their agreement to be purchased by Disney. Gaming is huge, especially online gambling, and Cai provided data from around the world as to why this cannot area cannot be ignored by service providers.
To some extent, thanks to the rise of casual gaming, virtual worlds and the Wii, gaming is becoming a much more of a social activity. Cai called the Wii, “The new family time.” Cai pointed out that their research indicates that word of mouth is still the number one way for discovering content, regardless of what the content is. Along these lines, John Barrett suggested that, “Social Networking is dial tone for the next generation.”
The following video provides the few highlights from
“NCAA Football Highlights on Veoh.com
The application that Veoh has developed allows fans to grab highlights of a game, mix them together and share them with their friends. It was not obvious to this author whether it is possible to edit or change the order of clips. As you can tell by the score, the videos are not in chronological order, which is what I wanted. Social networking aspects appear to be via emailing, on Veoh’s site, embedding the video into blogs, web site or sites like MySpace or Facebook.
There is no audio with the clips. This is probably because releases/contracts would need to negotiated with the on-air talent and the broadcasters. The lack of audio could be a feature, however, as a great social aspect to this could be the addition of fan audio, whereby fans could record their own play-by-play and send it to their friends. Interestingly, the following video still has the FSN bug on the upper right hand corner.
Probably the most amazing thing about this application is that the license occurred in the first place; media rules are definitely changing. The RSS feed capability pushes content highlights to the desktop automatically. This is exactly the type of application that IPTV has been promising for years. It will be interesting to see how this sort of application will compete against the limited highlight reels provided by the local broadcasters.
The other amazing thing about this service is that it was able to find any SJSU highlights. What a huge loss for this team that was a bowl winner last season.
What Is IPTV?
Sep 12
Brought to you by Occam Networks
By now, one would expect a uniform answer to such a simple question. Fortunately, I was able to gather a group of experts, via electronic means, to give their respective views on just what IPTV is. The following video provides a montage of comments from industry luminaries Kurt Scherf – Parks Associates, Jessica Kizorek – Two Parrot Productions, Sean Riley – Fox Cable Networks, Bruce May – White Blox, Joe Weber – Author of the IPTV Crash Course, Kris Harikrishnan – moowee.tv, Drew Lanza – Morgenthaler as they address this fundamental question. Comments are encouraged.
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Telecom @ NAB was exactly what the name implies – the convergence of telecom and video. The panel, Telecom Broadband Video Deployments – Real World Experiences, exemplified Telecom @ NAB. Kyle Thomson of Motorola moderated this panel that featured independent telco leaders discussing the challenges and opportunities they face when deploying a video product. Hear from Gene South of Lakedale Communications, Jim Rennard of Canby Telcom, Justyn Miller of KCTC (Kalona Tel) and Scott Sandall of D & E in this brief overview video of a very informative panel. Unfortunately, the audio for this piece was captured via an external camera microphone, so the quality isn’t what it would be had it been picked up directly from the mixer board. Note, the first 5 seconds or so of this video is an advertisement for Kasenna’s upcoming webinar, Scaling Your IPTV Service Delivery.
