Technology focus > Personal TV


Digital TV Europe September/October 2010


The personal touch


The shift from linear to on-demand viewing means that there is growing demand to cre- ate a more personalised viewing experience, including the ability to search for pro- grammes and receive recommendations from friends. Stuart Thomson investigates.


face the prospect of a shift from linear viewing to on-demand and time-shifted consumption of content over the coming years. Even within the linear viewing world, the fragmentation of audiences between a growing number of mul- tiple and time-shifted channels means that it is increasingly difficult for people to identify and find content they want to watch.


It is now accepted wisdom that


In a world that combines multiple linear channels with a growing availability of on- demand channels and – in the not too distant future – more open access to the web via the TV, the first generation grid-format EPG is unlikely to satisfy the needs of viewers for much longer. Pay-TV operators therefore must face down the threat of competition from over- the-top services and make their own walled- garden services as attractive as possible to


service providers will


retain their subscriber base. Rene Summer, director of government and industry relations, group function sales and marketing at Ericsson points out that service providers face competition not only from legitimate over-the- top services but from pirated content. However, finding and consuming content ille- gally is time-consuming and involves a certain element of risk to the consumer, which gives the legitimate service provider an opportunity. For Summer, the other key challenges facing service providers are – especially in the world of IPTV – the lack of standardisation of plat- forms, and the challenge of how to organise and package content in a way that makes busi- ness sense to the service provider. Regarding the organisation of content, the key hurdle to a truly personalised TV universe, says Summer, is the way that rights are man- aged, which prevents service providers from


unbundling and delivering on an à la carte basis. Currently, content providers see little incentive in unbundling what they provide, in the same way that the music industry resisted the move to online consumption because they did not believe that it would compensate for lost revenues through a collapse in sales of albums. Content providers also make the argu- ment that bundling content subsidises niche content that would not otherwise be produced. Summer argues that a move to à la carte could provide a premium on content that is pur- chased because users would purchase fewer titles but would spend more on them. In the case of public service content, he argues that the case for mandatory unbundling is strong: “We believe that state-financed production should be technologically agnostic.” Currently, the volume of content made available via pub- lic and commercial broadcasters’ own online


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