business today a renaissance?
It didn’t quite feel that historic. Manchester United more or less did exactly what they’d done to Arsenal at the same stadium last April. But for a select TV viewing audience it actually was historical as they witnessed what was claimed as the world’s first live sports 3D TV broadcast. Joe O’Halloran reports.
A renaissance?
T
he Arsenal Man Utd game was really the final test of the new Sky 3D channel which will launch in the UK in April. Sky says that once 3D TVs begin to reach the
consumer market later this year it will then make Sky 3D available to of all Sky+HD customers. All that customers need to do, says Gerry O’Sullivan, Sky’s director of strategic product development, is to buy a new 3D TV. That’s all.
That’s a rather big assumption given the general state of the economy right now and the fact that even HD services could nowhere near be described as anything other than minimal right now. But is the future of the industry all about 3D? Well 3D will certainly be a part of it but there is perhaps a more pressing issue that will determine the future. One which will concern not just the traditional broadcast industry but what may well be the face of the new industry. In fact, a new infrastructure for the industry. Without doubt, the broadcast industry has been hit hard by the full and deep extent of the global economic downturn. A general reigning in of leisure spending in homes across the world has been
6 l ibe l march/april 2010 l www.ibeweb.com
In general, the talk in the TV world should not be that of recession, nor even recovery, but that of renaissance.
accompanied by a crisis in the advertising industry driving plummeting prices for TV spots. And yet given all of that - and some pretty savage but essential cost cutting in media organisations - the industry has not only survived, it has come out inspired with service bouquets capable of delivering TV content in new and exciting forms - encompassing standard definition, high definition and even 3D - and delivered to platforms that transcend the traditional small screen. TV and video is now being consumed everywhere around the home, arriving at set top boxes and other receivers and delivered at acceptable levels of quality to state of the art TVs, PCs, laptops, netbooks, media tablets (such as the iPad), mobile phones, games platforms and portable media players of all description.
Homes, particularly those in Western Europe, are enjoying not only the mass availability of such exciting platforms (at mass market acceptable prices let’s not forget) but also the mass availability of high bandwidth TV network infrastructures - of which, in definition, one should consider encompasses satellite and cable as well as the relatively new
DSL, fibre and 3G/wireless networks - that are capable of supporting the delivery of the enhanced and enriched TV content.
In what may be a milestone in the evolution of networks capable of supporting such rich services, Google announced in February 2010 that it was planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. The intention of, shall we say, the former search engine company was to deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to currently with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. The end game, commercially at least, would be services at what it claimed to be competitive prices to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people. Encouragingly for some, or alarmingly for others, Google envisages that such networks will allow people to download an HD full-length feature film in less than five minutes. So clearly a new landscape is on the horizon. One in which enriched media services will operate and which could bring about, for the market and its players alike, business transformation, and deliver
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