Tag Archive for 'IPTV'

I Want My iTV

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 9-November-2007
in Content, Innovation and Media
. Comments

Cliff Sullivan from BusinessWeek writes,

But I won’t be getting it soon. While the technology is mostly in place, the players—from cable companies to film studios—can’t agree on how to make it happen.

I want to listen to music, have a box pop up on my screen telling me who’s phoning my home, or watch a vacation-themed slide show before forwarding it on to bore my friends on Facebook—all while sitting in front of the set in my living room. No one has yet put this wish list together in one nice, easy-to-use package.

They sure haven’t. As the author correctly points out, the reason is not the technology, but protection of existing business models. No one is addressing the gap between online content and the television.

While new technologies like IPTV bring digital content over IP to a STB connected to a TV, they do nothing to bridge the gap between online media and the TV.

So read the article at the BusinessWeek site and weigh in. What do you think? Is anyone addressing this gap? Do you want to watch online media on your TV? What features would you like to see in an iTV offering?

read more | digg story

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Goodbye Myrio

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 31-October-2007
in Communications, Innovation, Personal and Work
. Comments

Myrio Logo

Dear friends and colleagues,

As I depart Nokia Siemens Networks (Myrio was acquired in 2005 by Siemens and is now subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks), today marks the end of an era for me–11 amazing years.

When we started working on the technologies that became Myrio, we had a
dream that one day companies all over the world would be delivering TV
services over IP. We were certainly not clairvoyant enough to predict how,
what is now called IPTV, would develop over the coming years, but we knew
the power of Internet combined with entertainment would create amazing new possibilities. Although IPTV seems so “well duh” now, this was not the case–even just 5 years ago.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for
believing in Myrio and the possibilities it created. We could not have done
it without you!

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford.

Full text:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Youtube:

YouTube Preview Image

I want to share a short excerpt from that speech. He said, “You’ve got to
find what you love. [sic]. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the
heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it
just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don’t settle.”

Myrio and IPTV have most certainly been a labor of love.

As I sign off, I extend my best wishes to all of you.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

-ryan

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Class Action Suit Hopes To Sue “A La Carte Cable” Into Existence

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 21-September-2007
in Content and Politics
. Comments

A new class action lawsuit accuses the cable and satellite industries of acting illegally by only selling channels in bundles in order to milk customers. If Congress won’t do it, this lawsuit might.

read more | digg story

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Set-top Boxes Open Up

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 8-May-2007
in Innovation and Microsoft
. Comments

Set-top Boxes Open Up

“However, many assert that it’s Microsoft Corp. –which doesn’t make STBs and is often accused of attempting to lock in users to its own priority technologies %u2013 that has done the most to advance the role of the set-top box. “

I always love it when a writer makes a vauge reference to some nebulous 3rd party like “many”. Who are these “many”? “However, many assert that it’s Microsoft Corp. – which doesn’t make STBs and is often accused of attempting to lock in users to its own priority technologies – that has done the most to advance the role of the set-top box.However, many assert that it’s Microsoft Corp. – which doesn’t make STBs and is often accused of attempting to lock in users to its own priority technologies – that has done the most to advance the role of the set-top box.”

I have never met anyone, anywhere that would assert Microsoft has ever done anything but “open” hardware in an attempt to dominate a market. Microsoft creates the appearance of openness while denying to others the benefits thereof.

While multi-function devices like the Xbox 360 are very interesting and may help IPTV service providers differentiate service, remember this too is a Microsoft controlled platform.

Technologies such as OCAP provide a level playing field for a number of companies wishing to innovate on a cable operators network. While OCAP may not prove to be a panacea, technologies such as OCAP, where everyone has access to the platform, will do more to open up the STB market than anything Microsoft has ever or will ever do.

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Sizing up the IPTV Experience

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 16-March-2007
in Communications
. Comments

Sean Buckley of Telecommunications magazine writes that one quote from the IPTV World Forum in London really stood out for him. That quote, from Accenture’s Arjang Zadeh, stated “quality, not content, is king.” Well, yes and no. It is not that simple, let me explain.

Why would such a quote stand out in Mr. Buckley’s mind? Well, as he goes on to explain, it hits home for him because of problems he encounters with his current provider, Comcast. Fortunately, one of the problems Mr. Buckley describes with Comcast, the transient but eerily predictable, “timeout” error when trying to access the On Demand service, can most likely be explained as an artifact of delivering a two-way service over a network originally designed to support one-way video. Press, On Demand again, and everything works fine. Strange.

IPTV is not immune from “strange” quirks either. In fact ANY digital service is subject to these “quirks”. You see with an analog TV signal (really any analog signal, but we are talking IPTV here) there is a graceful degradation of quality–without entirely interrupting the video program. Remember snow? Depending on the strength of the analog signal you have a really great picture or you have a less than great picture but you have one. In a digital system, digital cable, satellite or IPTV, the degradation is less graceful. Depending on what bits are lost, the picture may still look great, there may be “macroblocking” or the picture may drop entirely. Any of these digital artifacts may occur to cable, satellite or IPTV. Our experience in the field showed us that subscribers that came directly to IPTV from an analog service (Off Air, analog cable) were more sensitive by the digital artifacts. Those that had previous “digital experience” were less sensitive to the artifacts. Makes sense, now.

Without describing in full detail all the of mechanisms available in an IPTV system to ensure Quality of Experience (QoE), suffice it to say, there are several just at the network level which ensure the reliable delivery of packets to the IPTV STB. Of course, IPTV benefits from its inherit support of two-way traffic (unlike the CATV network to which two-way capability has been added).

Furthermore, QoE depends not only on the effectiveness of the network (core, transport, access), but the experience provided by the software platform. Just ask any subscriber of early stage IPTV deployments. Our early customers and their subscribers suffered through painful stages of learning–ours and the service providers–as the industry learned to deliver video over the telecom network reliably. These are the pains I have recently written about for the AT&T Uverse deployment.

However, content is an integral part of QoE and cannot be excluded from analysis. What we (my employer, Siemens Communications) have learned from our leading IPTV customer Belgacom, is that content remains king. This is where I believe I part ways with Messrs Buckley and Zadeh. What Belgacom learned is if licensing premium content was king, licensing exclusive content is like being galactic emperor. Through their licensing of Belgian Premiere soccer, they attracted and more importantly retain subscribers. As you might expect from any relatively new technology, there have been QoE issues at Belgacom. However, understanding that great content is part of the overall QoE has been critical to the rapid success of BelgacomTV. A lesson for all IPTV service providers.

I will have more on Mr. Zadeh’s presentation in a future post.

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Ready or Not, AT&T Sells Uverse

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 1-March-2007
in Microsoft and Work
. Comments

Om Malik, from Gigaom (see links on right), has written a piece on AT&T Uverse deployment of the Microsoft IPTV platform.

It is hard to get a grip on AT&T’s IPTV efforts. Dubbed Uverse, some say AT&T’s television service it is still stuck in neutral, plagued by technical problems. AT&T, however feels otherwise, and has started making a strong marketing push for the service, according to a report in San Antonio-Express News. The company claims that it has ironed out all the technical glitches and is now ready to take on the cable operators.

We’re ready to take our foot off the brake and step on the accelerator, John Stankey, AT&T’s group president for operations, said Tuesday. By the end of the year, we will be up and running in every significantly sized market where we operate.

Fascinating, since it was only a couple of months ago that the company’s tech troubles were highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, pointing to the problems with Microsoft IPTV software.

From everything I know from publicly available sources and people close to the Microsoft product, the Uverse deployment is stabilizing (apparently, enought that AT&T feels compelled to begin limited rollouts), however the actual deployed service will have far fewer features than AT&T had hoped for and an order of magnitude fewer features than the Microsoft marketing machine has been pitching for the past 2 years.

The actual Uverse product looks very little like what Microsoft has been showing to the market, at trade shows and other public events. Many features of dubious customer value, like “instant channel change” are conspicuously absent from the Uverse deployment. However, their absence is not by choice, but due to poor architectural choices and a poor understanding of service provider economics. It looks like Microsoft is learning the hard lessons about building a scalable IPTV solution–lessons the rest of us learned years ago. It would also appear AT&T is learning a tough lesson about listening to the Redmond marketing machine.

Unfortunately for AT&T, the next lessons will be even more painful as their “partner” begins competing with them for their own customers. Just look at what’s happening with Xbox Cinema on Xbox Live. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure their brand remains prominent in their IPTV offering. There will be no question in the mind of Uverse users that they are using a Microsoft product (insert joke here).

The Uverse service gives Microsoft a prime opportunity to upsell subscribers to other Microsoft products like Media Center PCs, powered by Vista and mobile devices powered by Windows Mobile. These devices do not have to be connected to the AT&T Uverse service but connected directly to Microsoft “over the top” of AT&T.

Thus far, Microsoft has played nice (relatively speaking) with its service provider customers in the mobile arena. This is not surprising when you recognize that they have the financial resources and investor backing to be very very patient when entering new markets. However, just as the success of the iPod precipiated Microsoft dumping its “Plays for sure” partners and building their own “iPod killer”, the Zune, I believe the iPhone will inspire the monopolists in Redmond to take a harder stance with wireless operators and begin to push for concessions that give them more control over the mobile devices running Windows–just as they do on PCs today. The emphasis for Microsoft will shift from providing capabilities that give wireless operators the platform and toolsets to build compelling wireless features, to the virtues Windows Mobile for the wireless consumer. The service providers differentiation and value add will diminish to the point that the average mobile consumer won’t care from whom they get the service, but only that they have the latest version of Windows Mobile and Microsoft mobile applications (has anyone seen this movie before?).

This same fate awaits AT&T in their wireline business as their Uverse subscribers increasingly look for Windows and Windows applications, caring less and less about the network (and service provider) that delivers them. The next few years should be interesting.

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Gates says TV is doomed, Internet where it’s at

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 29-January-2007
in Communications and Microsoft
. Comments

Speaking to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates looked deep into his crystal ball and prognosticated that in 5 years, TV will be a lame duck and watching video on the internet will be all the rage. Way to go out on a limb Bill.

“Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it,” he said. Tivo has been doing this for years, and most cable and satellite providers offer PVR options.  Maybe Bill just doesn’t watch a lot of TV.

From Grant Robertson @ Download Squad, “What wider adoption of internet distributed video will bring and what the heads of major networks and news organizations should be up nights worrying about is democratization of content creation. More and more we’re finding great entertainment in low-buck, short format indie video and, in five years, the upper echelon of 15-24 year olds who are currently rocking the funny on sites like YouTube will be a force to reckon with, possibly even taking notches out of networks like Fox and NBC.

What’s stopping this all from happening immediately? Two things, monetization of content and a simple and ubiquitous TV/internet convergence device. For certain, any company who manages to solve either of those problems and catch the wave of public acceptance is headed for a big payday.”

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Who will bring the Internet to your TV?

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 6-January-2007
in Uncategorized
. Comments

As the hype builds for CES, the New York Times divides the competitors for your living room into three categories. The Incumbents like HBO already have a stake in America’s TV market. Latching on to them are the Extenders, who provide the actual devices to link up with your PC. Finally, the Straight Shooters bridge the gap with software.

read more | digg story

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Siemens vs. Microsoft on IPTV (Part One of Two)

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 6-January-2007
in Communications, Microsoft and Work
. Comments
Over at ITVT, there is a two part interview with representatives from Siemens and Microsoft debating their varying approaches to IPTV technologies and the market. Of course, I am biased as my team and I make many of the decisions about the Siemens approach to the market as well as many of the technology choices in our solution.
It will be very interesting to hear the Microsoft marketing machine as they respond to our perspective as captured in part one.   The Microsoft marketing machine has typically done a very good job in “responding” to critical reviews of their IPTV solution.
For those of you who don’t understand the approach Microsoft has taken in IPTV, it is typical Microsoft.  Take the best ideas from the market leaders (embrace), and modify the established approach to enhance your competitive position (extend).  Classic Microsoft.
For IPTV,  Microsoft used several plays from this well worn playbook. For example, Microsoft embraced much of the established ideas in IPTV, but they created a new concept they called “instant channel change”.  Before Microsoft came into the market, no one knew they needed and “instant” channel change, but Microsoft’s marketing team convinced the market that IPTV could be better only if it included instantaneous channel changing.  In my view, this is not exactly the kind of disruptive feature a telco needs to convince a customer to leave cable or satellite and move to IPTV.
What Microsoft did not tell customers, was that to achieve “instant” channel change,  it would require a completely revamped broadcast architecture, deviating from accepted IPTV architectures, extensive use of unicast, and a complete dependency on Microsoft technology (codec, DRM, streaming servers etc.).  Complete technology lock in and reliance on Microsoft.  Who really benefited from instant channel change, well Microsoft, of course.  As we and others began to question the market value of such a feature, the market took a critical look at Microsoft’s approach.
In the end, the technological complexity (think cost, $$$) required to achieve this effect and the fact that it relied on Microsoft server software (which everyone knows is not even close to carrier grade), could not be justified by the business case.  Will instant channel change come to a TV near you, possibly, but a number of vendors have shown how to achieve the same result in a standards based fashion–with no Microsoft lock in.
Instant channel change is just one example, but Microsoft has been very quiet about most of their competitive differentiators as of late.  Why?  Well, they are under the gun to get AT&T working beyond trial subscribers.  Of course the Microsoft marketing machine would have us all believe they have “launched”, well that is a matter of perspective.  My belief is that AT&T cannot deploy anywhere, anytime to any subscriber nor can they market the service at full speed because Microsoft is still working through service debilitating bugs and cannot show the scalability that AT&T needs to go full speed ahead.

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Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 27-November-2006
in Communications and Content
. Comments

Rafat Ali from PaidContent.org quotes Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang’s report on, Long Tail, but focuses on what he calls the mid part of the content and distribution value chain, where he sees the most value in the long run…that mid part is the part of aggregation-and-context players in the market, with the theory that “Value of aggregation and brands increases with exponential increase in content choices.”
This chart below has some detail:

Sweet Spot Graph

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