Weekly news roundup 27.02.09

IPTV

• The Guardian reports that starting up project Canvas could cost up to £24m
• Microsoft improves its Xbox Live service proposition (via TechRadar)

On Demand

• ITV on-demand becomes available on Virgin Media’s catch up service (via TechRadar)
• Panasonic revealed that the BBC iPlayer will come to Freesat this year, allowing on-demand TV to be watched through set top boxes without subscribing to Virgin Media. (via ElectricPig)
• YouTube and iPlayer heading for Freeview mark two (via Telegraph)

Content providers

• Amazon Beats Apple's iTunes As Preferred Digital Media Provider according to Strategy Analytics.
• Popular video-sharing site Metacafe aims to launch optimised service through IPTV (via NMA)

HDTV

• Telegraph article covers which broadcasters delivering HD content at what costs

Blu-ray

• Panasonic launches duel tuner Freesat HD PVR (via TechWatch)

50Mbps broadband: yay or nay?

I’ve been following the series of Speed Diary posts from Darren Waters on BBC dot.life in which he questions the real benefit of having 50Mbps broadband connection in an average household, where you get an adequate performance at a connection speed as low as 3mbps.

Broadband providers are increasingly using the term “high speed” as a strap line to sell broadband packages without really highlighting the benefits for end users, therefore Darren’s attempt to challenge it is a valid one.

So, in order to find out how the experience of using 50Mbps broadband compared with less speedier ASDL connection, Darren performed some of the most bandwidth intensive activities such as video streaming (iPlayer), and online gaming (Xbox), and simultaneous downloads. During the test, he made the following observations, which are interesting:

1. Having faster broadband doesn’t necessarily improve the speed of your web browsing experience
2. Accessing the web over wi-fi on a portable device like an iPhone or PSP with a 50Mbps connection seems no different to using an ADSL 6Mbps connection
3. Speed Tests are useful but no replacement for the actual experience in using a connection

Although I suspect the first two points might have their rightful place in the current market, I believe the quality of high-speed broadband will eventually catch up as the demand for multi-platform, streamlined HD content increases. However, I do agree with the last point that broadband speed alone shouldn’t define the quality of experience of using mega speedy broadband.

Take a few minutes to read Darren’s diary posts as it makes a very interesting read:

Speed Diary: Day One
Speed Diary: Day Two
Speed Diary: Day Three
Speed Diary: Day Four

The Future of interactive TV revealed

There was a great story in the Metro last week picking up on some predictions from interactive technology research house Future Laboratory based around the future of interactive TV and networked homes. Although the mainstream media has been riding on the TV on Contact Lenses headlines, I particularly enjoyed the following predictions:

1. Intelligent home entertainment management system based on humanoid avatars will be huge. What’s more these interactive avatars will eliminate the need for content search through a remote control as it will enable viewers to control TV through voice recognition or dialogue.
2. The choice for channels will continue to grow but user generated content (UGC) will equally dominate viewers preference for home entertainment
3. With TV screens networked to the internet, viewers will be able to tailor their home entertainment the way they customise social networking sites like Myspace
4. Watching a telly will no longer be passive as people will be share preferences and connect with others through their networked TVs
5. Multi-sensory technology planted on our bodies will enable highly immersive TV watching experience

Although some of these may seem a little too futuristic for some we’ve already seem some of these themes demonstrated at shows & exhibitions in the last 12 months. UGC, Avatars and Social Networking sites on the TV are more than just ideas.

You can read the full story here

Weekly IPTV news roundup

So much is going on in our industry at the moment, I'm having a hard time keeping up.

As is customary for Q1 there’s a wealth of forecast statistics and deployment numbers being circulated in the news. Here’s a brief round-up of stories that I’ve seen in the past few weeks:

IPTV in France

• 1/3 of all French broadband subscribers now take an IPTV service, according to France's telecoms regulator Arcep.
• France now has 5.4 million IPTV subscribers and is growing at 39% year on year.
• France Telecom's Orange TV is the market leader with 1.5m subs or around 27% of the market, with Neuf TV in second place.

Global IPTV

• Worldwide IPTV subscribers reach 16m
• Meanwhile, In-Stat is predicting that the global IPTV market will more than treble by the end of 2012 and will break the 72 million mark in 2013.

IPTV carriers

• Estonia's Elion announced that they ended 2008 with 82,500 IPTV and cable subscribers, up from 57,700 the previous year. Elion now estimates it has a 26% share of the cable market but remains in 3rd place after Starman and STV.

Set-top box

• Amino have shipped over 2m units

Interview with Tattletech

Last week, I was kindly asked to take part in the Tattletech Hot Seat where we discussed some relevant trends in the IPTV industry including TV widgets, mobile apps and IPTV browser technology. You can read the full interview here.

While you take a few minutes to read the interview, please do check out some of their other stories covering news and opinions from the telecommunications industry and mobile sector.

On-demand TV competition heats up

There’s been a significant improvement in the quality of on-demand TV services offered by the UK broadcasters and cable and satellite networks. This is partly due to the increased adoption of high-speed broadband and the government’s plans to boost the digital industry.

As the competition heats up for on-demand TV providers to offer the most compelling, on-demand content package at a competitive price, viewers are being given more options to watch on-demand TV through platforms of their choice. To help viewers gain better perspective on what’s out there, I put together slides comparing some of the most popular on-demand TV services in the UK with a little help from my team at ANT.

UK On-demand TVs Compared

View more presentations from ANTplc. (tags: tv on-demand)

Breaking news online

There’s an interesting flow chart, originally posted by Michael Surtees on DesignNotes that I thought I’d share.

The chart below illustrates how people used different online tools and platforms to break the Hudson River plane crash news. While looking at it, I was amazed to see how news can be instantly broken to potentially hundreds and thousands of online surfers and viewers, with the use of simple microblogging and live-streaming tools like Twitter.


With mobile and live streaming tools playing an increasingly important role in breaking eye witness stories, it seems to be just a question of time before these are incorporated into a microblogging TV widget running on an IPTV platform.

Global IPTV subscribers reach 16 million

It’s always useful to keep an eye out for new industry forecasts. The latest set conducted by US research company Dittberner (as posted on Broadband TV News), says the total number of IPTV subscribers worldwide has reached 16 million, marking a significant growth compared to previous years.

Moreover, the research revealed that EMEA has seen the most growth in IPTV subscribers and more specifically France has the highest number of subscribers with the second highest broadband penetration level worldwide. France's high IPTV adoption was attributed to its extensive deployment of home gateways that allow the “efficient creation of higher revenue services”.

CES 2009: An Appreciation of Innovation

I returned from CES a few weeks ago, nevertheless I’ve been planning to blog on this for a quite some time so here it goes.

This years Consumer Electronics Show once again provided the forum for new products, new technologies and new ideas of how it all might work together. In the backdrop of broader global economic challenges, this show certainly provided the inspiration to march forward into 2009 on the right foot.

A number of interesting new technologies caught my eye while in Vegas, ranging from advances in seamless wireless connectivity, connected home services, Microsoft’s Surface Tables, 3D Gaming and TV experiences, embedded services to truly brilliant Web Connected TV’s.

With a personal project underway back at home, I was impressed to see a diverse set of well priced solutions for distributing content around the home. This came in the form of solutions like the Divx Connected TV device that allows you to stream content (video, pictures, music and applications) in HD to your TV or watch on your PC. There was also a wide range of HDMI to Ethernet switches & transceivers, making it much easier to distribute from a central location around your home in HD – if only these were available before I started a few month ago… Even so, the vision of a connected home was realised in a very practical way by a number of exhibitors.

Channel4 Skins on Messenger

As Skins' second series makes a start on Thursday, C4 has launched a new messenger service (in partnership with Microsoft MSN Messenger) that enables a chat based TV viewing experience. According to its website the series will be supported by soundtracks, diaries, and extras in real time.

Although the technology behind it is nothing new, Instant Messaging coupled with interactive streaming is an interesting move from C4 in an attempt to take the series across multiple platforms in real time. It’s a smart move to embrace the twitter style community that I’ve talked about in the past that watches TV and chats at the same time online. How long before this all takes place on the same screen though, as we showed at the IPTV World Forum last March, the technology is ready…

On-demand adds to TV viewer figures

I read an excellent article from Julian Clover of Broadband TV News over the weekend about how on-demand TV is reinterpreting broadcasters’ approach to measuring viewer figures.

According to Julian’s insight, since the on-demand measuring system Unitam, for digital cable and satellite channels, was rolled out in 2006, on-demand data now contributes significantly to broadcasters’ performance figures. Meanwhile, BARB data has revealed that the number of hours we spend watching the fixed TV has dropped.

What’s more interesting, it’s said that multichannel broadcasters like Sky are benefiting most from these new consolidated viewing figures from BARB.

Julian also points out that the new figures make ITV2 and ITV3 as the most watched individual channels partly because of a successful cross promotion and a wider reach through Freeview DTT platform.

Twitter is a hit in the UK

Internet research company, Hitwise, reported that Twitter is one of the fastest growing web sites in the UK, with traffic rising tenfold in the past 12 months.

What started as a very dense community site around micro-conversations has had a 974 per cent traffic increase in the UK last year alone. This astonishing fast growth was said to be augmented by a number of global catastrophic events including Mumbai bombing incident and the Hudson airplane crash, during which active users of the site ushered in to provide real-time eye witness updates. In addition, Twitter has attracted a number of global celebrities like Barack Obama and Britney Spears, as well as popular TV personalities including Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross.

Webuser has a pretty decent list for all celebrity users here, if you’d like to join the microverse.

Watch the Pope on Youtube TV

As reported on Wired, the most watched video sharing site Youtube recently launched a video channel available on Nitendo Wii and PS3 consoles, bringing in a vast archive of user and pro generated content direct to TV viewers, including video messages from the Pope Benedict XVI, a new channel launched by the Vatican. Youtube TV has been developed with the TV user in mind rather than the PC or laptop, this is a smart approach when taking web content to the TV, they’ve also tweaked it so that can watch a series of similar videos on an auto-play. See below for a demo of Youtube on PS3.

It was mentioned that the quality of watching Youtube on Wii and PS differs slightly, but overall Wii has the upper hand when it comes to delivery as it has more than 40 million consoles in use globally, as posted previously here.

Currently in Beta, Youtube TV is said to be providing APIs for developers.

How are you watching Barack Obama’s Inauguration?

With millions and possibly billions of global citizens expected to watch and celebrate the new US president Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony tomorrow, it’s predicted that all major broadcast and internet sites will be inundated with live reporting. However, with so many options out there, how are you planning to watch the inauguration?

If you're not sure yet, below are where the celebration will be broadcast online:

• Barack Obama Inauguration website
• Online News sites i.e BBC or Sky HD
• Youtube or Hulu
• Mobile (via uStream.com)
• P2P app (Livestation)
• Webcast (Everything Obama page on Joost)
• Facebook (in partnership with CNN)
• Current & Twitter
• Photosynth 3D Panorama
  

Who Wants Widgets?

When any technology is suddenly hyped or gets a ramp in news coverage, it is always interesting to read the minority report. Farhad Manjoo's CES piece in Slate magazine is no exception. In this article he addresses a topic I commented on last week – the rise of widgets on the TV.

While Manjoo makes some good points, his central argument seems to be the tired old lean-forward vs lean-back user interaction that sums up the differences between TV and PC. For me, widgets are more subtle - I see them as an evolution of the European teletext service and the digital red button apps. Teletext and EPG are not lean-forward activities, they are just ways to augment the information that the TV provides the user. TV widgets will fulfil a similar function.

What about Flickr and Amazon though? Is one-click ordering a book really that interactively different than one-click ordering a movie? Is organising your photos really so different to organising your night's viewing? It doesn't feel different to me.

Open IPTV Forum publishes system and protocol specifications

The Open IPTV Forum published version 1.0 of their end-to-end specifications for an IPTV System yesterday. As active members of the Forum and a strong supporters of open standards, the team at ANT are pleased that the specifications are now generally available to the public, and we hope that they will help the industry as a whole to move forward and build some really exciting new services that show off the real potential of IPTV.

Apple drops DRM for good

Apple has announced that every song in its iTunes music store will be DRM-free and available in high quality 256bit audio by the end of March this year. iTunes music store has over 10 million music tracks and 75 million users, which makes it no.1 music retailer in the US.

Apple has also taken the opportunity to release iTunes 8 and revamp its music store price points, moving from a single price point of 99c in the US to a three tier pricing model: 69c for old music, 99c for tastemaker or emerging music and $1.29 for new singles from popular artists.

It's taken an incredibly long time for music listeners to change Apple's outlook on DRM, but it looks like the music executives are finally starting to understand and accept that in fact DRM fails to prevent piracy - indeed it only really serves to penalise and annoy law-abiding music downloaders.

Yahoo lands full on TV Widgets

Yahoo has re-emerged with yet another strategically important partnership in the TV space, as it announced that it will be offering a TV Widget service in partnership with Samsung.

It was revealed that the service will be offered on Samsung’s new internet-connected HDTVs with content feeds from Yahoo! news channels and Flickr, where viewers will be able to browse news and photos on a large screen. The widget service will provide updates on localised content such as weather forecasts, the stock market and shares information.

With the emergence of large HDTVs, services like this will help content providers to push both existing and new content through easily accessible widgets in real time. However, whilst TV widgets can’t be interacted with in the same way as a PC or lap top, they will give new media content providers a great opportunity to tie the widget, or application, more closely to the content.

The real value of widget technology can be achieved when it’s extended to multiple devices from games consoles, to set-top boxes and mobile phones further enabling end-to-end peer interaction. Here at ANT we’ve already experimented with similar services on the STB and will be launching more in the future so watch this space!

Wii bit of TV from Nintendo

Nintendo is set to offer TV on the Wii game console, the move marks an interesting development in the IPTV and broadcast industry, as it’s reckoned that 40 million households worldwide use the Wii and almost half are connected to the internet. Nintendo will be looking to build on advertising and content revenue with the new service. It is expected to begin in Japan this spring and will be rolled out globally by the end of the year with exclusive content including cartoons, cookery programmes, brain-training quizzes and lifestyle shows.

Tiscali cuts Italian IPTV service

On the eve of New Year, Tiscali announced that it will no longer continue its IPTV service in Italy, much to the surprise of its 50,000 customers. Already, Tiscali's exit has caused remarks about the state of the company’s position in the IPTV and broadband market and whether it will seize significant stronghold in the highly competitive UK market. Both Telcos and ISP operators like Sky, Virgin and Vodafone are increasingly towering over with better integrated network bundles.