IPTV focus > Connected TV
Digital TV Europe
April 2010
Middleware provider ANT is a strong sup- porter of standards including HbbTV.
to what happened with the Apple App store,” says Zvika Haas, product and marketing direc- tor at set-top provider AirTies. Service providers themselves could adopt a loosely defined walled garden model in order to differentiate their offerings from disruptive new entrants, and enhance their existing pay- TV services. They continue to enjoy advan- tages. The speed at which over-the-top will eat into their market is likely to be slowed by the symbiotic relationship between content providers and their traditional distribution platforms. Cable and other pay-TV operators after all continue to provide the bulk of rev- enues to channel owners. Content providers are therefore unlikely to cut the strings that bind them to pay-TV platform operators in favour of a DIY approach. Nevertheless, the new entrants – whether consumer electronics firms or free-to-air broadcasters – cannot be ignored. As Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of video search engine provider Blinkx points out, not all popular content con- sists of big budget shows that require mass distribution platforms. Low-cost reality for- mats can command even larger audiences. “TV manufacturers doing it directly and even games console providers are opening up the market,” says Chandratillake, who argues that walled-garden services are comparable with early attempts to do something similar on the web, and are likely to be superseded by a more open model. Blinkx has teamed up with UK connected TV start-up Miniweb, pro- viding the search capability to power the lat- ter’s platform. Miniweb provides an interface and the Blinkx search engine can find pro- gramming and web-based content that is rele- vant to the interests of the viewer.
Ian Valentine, chief architect and founder of
Miniweb, argues that connected TV is the fourth major shift in TV technology (following the move from black and white to colour, ana- logue to digital, and standard to high-defini- tion). “It’s a natural evolution that enhances the value of TV,’ he says. “It’s more significant than the hype around IPTV, which was basi- cally a means for a telco to use DSL to deliver a pay-TV service like cable.”
Points of differentiation
For Valentine, the popularisation of the user guide by digital TV platforms together with innovations including the DVR have accus- tomed people to navigate the TV experience in a different way, preparing the ground for an opening out of the platform to a much wider
maximum amount of internet video to a device when it’s connected.” The key, he says, is to make search manageable. The argument for a platform such as Miniweb is similar to that put forward by the BBC for its Project Canvas initiative – to avoid a situation where content providers have to build applica- tions to run on every device in the market. One of the sources of tension in the emerging connected TV space is between device manu- facturers, who want to be able to develop their own user interfaces as a point of differentia- tion, and content providers that want to exer- cise some editorial control over the way their services are presented. For Valentine, the problem that faces the backers of Canvas and similar projects is that they want to push device manufacturers in a particular direction, but the device manufac- turers (which do not have content but do have global scale) may want to go in another. Making the service manageable to the user is certainly a key challenge. There is clearly a need on the part of consumers within particu- lar markets for some kind of unified platform for services. “A model where every TV chan- nel has its own VOD service would make the consumer experience worse rather than bet- ter,” says Paul Bristow, vice-president of strate- gy at set-top box supplier ADB. With free-to-air content suppliers increas- ingly moving towards the creation of their own platforms after the manner of pay-TV providers, and content owners creating their
“I think there will be a big battle between the telcos and cable operators, the major
internet players and big consumer brands.”
Christophe Aulnette, Netgem
variety of content sources available on the web. Connected TV is not, however, the same as just making the web available on TV. Connected TV is about bringing video-rich content from the web and tailoring the naviga- tional elements for consumption on the TV. “The connected TV user experience is TV on steroids,” he says. “We have focused [our own] business around video and how to get the
own VOD portals linked to archive content, the number of interfaces through which the consumer will be invited to search for his or her desired evening’s viewing can only prolif- erate. “From a user’s perspective, I don’t want to have to zap through 200 channels each with their own VOD portal,” says Bristow. Creating a completely open environment to content and application providers is seen by
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