Its Time To Look At The Player Brands Again

December 2011 – We are beginning to wonder whether it is time to have a good look at the role of player brands again.   Looking at the evolution in consumer behaviour around VOD consumption, and the new TV systems being built, it feels like we need a new push to re-focus marketing effort onto broadcast brands again.

The current phase of development in on-demand distribution is driving the migration of whole programme viewing from second screens (like the PC) to the first screen (the television).  VOD is coming home to TV.   This is happening first in pay TV, but free boxes are not far behind.

As it makes this journey,  the on-demand model is fragmenting. We used to talk about VOD as if it was a single thing.  Now, we can see that movies on demand, catalogue TV and catch-up TV are beginning to behave very differently.  In particular catch-up TV  is breaking out of the ‘VOD’ bucket and is being very slowly bolted in behind broadcast.   Both Virgin Tivo and Youview have broadcast EPGs that you can use to access catch-up VOD by clicking on a programme title.  Effectively, you go through broadcast to reach catch-up so it doesn’t make sense to then show a consumer a player brand.  This will increasingly be the case for FTA broadcasters content in all the pay platforms, or free set top boxes.

You hear people asking whether you need broadcast brands in the world of on-demand but broadcasters should remind themselves that broadcasting is the core business and that the brand strategy should follow on from that.   The industry should seek to protect broadcast channels and most importantly, protect broadcast brands, because they are at the core of the future of broadcast TV.

The player brands can be a massive distraction and with catch-up being integrated into the bigger TV proposition,  broadcasters should stop the ‘balkanization’ of their business structure. Catch up should be positioned as a support function for broadcast, not an alternative to broadcast.

Decipher has long been concerned at the balkanisation of the TV industry with VOD teams, staffed by non-broadcast people, using different brands, often in a different building, being given a free rein to decide the future of on-demand distribution. (See ‘Who Gave The It Department A F~*ckng Brand To Play With?)  But that approach needs to end in his view, and decisions about how VOD is handled must now go higher up the chain of command within a broadcast channel.  Senior broadcast management must take responsibility for the complete channel proposition.

Defining how a 21st century TV channel works, with the content and brand interplay between broadcast, catch-up and catalogue on-demand alongside the battle not to be submerged by the brand aspirations of the platforms, is the great challenge for the next 10 years.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

What ‘Integration’ Means For TV

By Lloyd Mason – November 2011

We’ve been having a long hard think about how increasing interconnectivity of devices in and out of the home wouldn’t improve day to day TV consumption – in summary, we’re drawing blanks.

Connecting the gadgets in your home has never been the most attractive of tasks. It something that should be left to the techies and if you fancied giving it a go, inevitably you’d need the IT department round halfway through to untangle the mess. However, life as we know has changed, and integration is no longer something to shy away from.

Driven initially by the device manufacturers, particularly Sony, Samsung and LG, all our TV related devices – screens, Blu-ray Players and remotes – are starting to talk to one another. What’s more, they’re bringing other pieces of tech into the fold such as PCs, smartphones an tablets.

The key piece of kit which facilitates the ‘talking’ and has been instrumental in the emergence of these systems is the unassuming and often ignored HomeHub (or equivalent home wireless router). By hooking all your devices up to the Hub, ideally using wired connections but increasingly wirelessly too, you enter a brave new world in accessing content.

Agreed ways of working, known as standards, have been outlined between many of the major consumer electronics companies who seek to utilise the power if the home network and connect their devices together to offer a great consumer outcome. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) are one such set of standards.

So what is this outcome? Simply speaking it is the ability to move and consume content, for our purposes video, anywhere in the home. Anecdotally, you should be able to start watching Avatar in the kitchen whilst washing up on an internet connected TV, continue in the lounge on the main TV which is hooked up to a connected Blu-ray Player, then finish the film off in bed on your laptop or tablet; all without breaking into a sweat or incidentally, the bank.

This is great for consumers, especially if the content they are dealing with is something they’ve paid for (rather than downloaded illegally or been given by auntie Maude) because they need to get as much value out of it as possible. This point is particularly potent in an age where digital rentals and purchases are becoming an increasingly popular method of consumption.

This added value is even more attractive to the pay-TV platforms we have here in the UK, more specifically Sky and Virgin Media. They already have a deep commitment to their paying customers to not only deliver great broadcast TV but also additional functionality such as recording, lot’s of video on demand, a decent level of customer service and provide premium programming such as sports and movies. Allowing their customers to manage and consume this TV in new and exciting ways is a service which only they can offer and combines to justify the Direct Debit exiting their bank accounts each month. This becomes even more essential when low cost subscription services such as LoveFilm and Netflix (UK launch soon) can offer a decent experience for a fraction of the cost.

Platforms have this unique opportunity which broadcasters don’t. The BBC, and it’s sector leading pseudo-platform iPlayer only serve BBC content (as do the other free to air broadcaster players) i.e. They can only aggregate to a limited extent. The other non-platform UK TV aggregators such as blinkbox, YouTube and pre-collapse SeeSaw don’t have the depth of platform-customer interaction or hardware distribution which is needed for comprehensive content ‘ecosystem’.

Virgin Media’s new TiVo box is planning on meeting one request: moving shows from one box to the other. The multi-room plans for the box will allow each installed box to talk over the home network and let users watch their recordings from any box on any other box.

Sky are instead looking to their mobile and tablet apps as the first place to establish multiple-location access to a subscription. Tying up the current Sky MobileTV and SkyPlayer services makes logical sense and the already agreed rights deals for web and mobile have provided a boost the realisation of access on-the-go. The broader title of this initiative is Sky Anywhere with the product now called Sky Go; to support the increased availability of Sky through mobile and the web, the service now includes access to hundreds of wireless hotspots for Sky customers to make a user’s out-of-home experience as reliable as possible. This will be fundamental to the usability, and therefore the success, of the experience.

This is where the current limitations of interconnectivity become evident. Current internet access speeds, particularly from mobile, severely restrict what can be consumed (length and image quality of programmes) and where (only in 3G or WiFi zones). Until widespread coverage of 3G mobile data, accompanied by the appearance and growth of 4G, a decent TV experience will rely on WiFi or be locked inside the home. At the moment innovations such as AirPlay by companies such as Apple have proven the value in such a system; however the “magical” nature is restricted to in-home connectivity, rather than use on the go, which through Apple’s iCloud set-up become decidedly more pedestrian.

With the deliberate intention of sounding like a spoilt brat: I want my TV, and I want it now! Innovations such as DLNA an it’s future siblings should better pounced upon by the platforms. Two of the key boxes are ticked – desirable content and widespread installed hardware it’s just the systems themselves and nationwide mobile connectivity which we are waiting for to make this come alive.

Filed under: Uncategorized , convergence, distribution&devices, home network, integration

Second Screen Advertising – an emerging opportunity?

John Moulding of Videonet talks to Decipher’s Nigel Walley and Matthew Kershaw of BBH.

Commercial broadcasters need to move quickly to ensure they have engaging second screen apps and content to keep viewers loyal beyond the main television screen, then find ways to sell that new inventory to advertisers. We are facing a period of disruption during which third-parties will fight them for eyeballs with companion apps that are synchronised, possibly in real-time, with what is happening on the television.

There could be new advertising money for TV, flowing from direct marketing budgets because of the interactivity and social engagement that is possible on the second screen.  Read rest of article on Videonet site here.

Filed under: Uncategorized

IFA Uncovered

By Decipher Consultant  Philippe Epailly

We at Decipher always stay at the forefront of TV industry trends, a trip to the IFA tradeshow in Berlin this year enabled a first glance at novel technologies before their official launch. The IFA is the world’s largest and most important trade fair for consumer electronics, the big themes this year included the accelerating number of tablets on the market and for a second consecutive year, 3D TV. The development and integration of apps on Smart TVs, in particular the new HbbTV standard (Hybrid broadcast broadband Television) is arguably one of the most influential technologies to impact consumer’s video consumption.
First, let’s have a look at the 3D TVs showcased which were a major attraction to consumers at the fair. Most TV manufacturers had their new range of 3D tellys on display with bigger screens and a higher resolution, but Toshiba certainly had the most spectators with the world’s first glasses-free 3D TV. They claim that up to 9 viewers can watch 3D simultaneously and at 55 inches this TV certainly makes an impression. Having battled the queue to experience the new 3D TV, it appears that the technology is not quite ready yet as the picture quality and 3D effects are not that impressive in comparison to the 3D screens using active and passive 3D glasses we have at our media lab in Chiswick (www.iburbiastudios.co.uk). In addition to this, Toshiba’s glasses-free screen has a price tag of around £8,000 and will struggle to attract more than early adopters.
The innovation in 3D sounds exciting to the consumer but with limited 3D content available in the UK such as Sky’s linear channel, the odd rental on pay platforms and 3D Blu-Ray discs, content providers are yet to find a way to make it mainstream. Apart from the obligation to wear 3D glasses, the lack of 3D content is the main hindrance of the success of 3D in the living room to date and without more content to choose from, the best glasses-free 3D TV will be of no use to consumers.
Amongst all this flashy new technology, the feature which will be more accessible to consumers is the launch of the HbbTV standard and the progress in Smart TV technology lead by the addition of LG to the collaboration of Philips, Sharp and German manufacturer Loewe to establish a common platform for TV apps.
There were quite a few companies, from TV manufacturers to suppliers of set-top-boxes that showcased the newly introduced HbbTV services in Germany. Most German broadcasters including both public and private, have their own service now. The HbbTV standard seems to have done a great job of delivering content to the end-consumer, the service itself looks like a mixture of the old Teletext service and the red button service with the capability to watch catch-up content. It’s a visually rich interface which is congruent among different platforms and makes it easy for content providers to push their content onto multiple platforms.
This is where it becomes interesting for the UK market as the Youview consortium is set to launch its service in early 2012. The new HbbTV services launched at the IFA have clearly shown that it’s capable of distributing content through a visually rich interface with plenty of content but with rumours of Freeview and Freesat boxes using HbbTV technology coming to market soon it will be interesting to see who is able to establish itself over time.
Similar as for 3D, Smart TVs have the problem of content distribution as content providers have to develop an app for each platform which makes it a lengthy process. This means that TV manufacturers often struggle to get content for their Smart TV platforms which makes it unattractive to consumers but a common platform for TV apps is a great start to profit from synergies of various manufacturers working together. This just leaves to hope that the other big TV manufacturers such as Sony, Samsung and Toshiba join this alliance soon which will simplify the distribution of content on Smart TVs and offer a better service to consumers.

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Can Push VOD be the New Pull VOD?

Here’s a question I discussed at dinner in IBC last week.  If you could start a new TV business today how would you do it.  If your choice was to either  start a VOD based business or to launch a PVR based business, which would you choose?  When we discussed this in Amsterdam, the question was laced with a key assumption. This was that memory innovation will occur quicker than network innovation – i.e. hard drives will get bigger at a quicker rate than networks will increase in size and coverage. Meaning that push VOD, which  uses a PVR’s recording capability to create an on-demand outcome, could benefit from technology innovation faster that pull VOD will.  It it not unreasonable to imagine a generation of PVRs coming with 2-3 TB of memory and 5-10 tuners.

In their Anytime+ service we can already see how BSkyB use push-VOD to mitigate network deficiencies to deliver HD content on-demand.   The mechanism is invisible to consumers who are presented with screens offering the available shows.  We make the assumption that this is done with the agreement of the broadcasters concerned.  However, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.  As PVR memory sizes increase, and metadata becomes further integrated into TV systems, it may even  be possible for the platforms to configure a form of push-VOD which remove the need for any kind of on-demand agreements with the free-to-air broadcasters. They can do this by offering two things: a huge variety of new recording options and new, graphically rich, presentation techniques for the recorded shows.

Recording Options

The key here will be offering the consumer new functionality by which they can ‘self—create’ an on-demand outcome.    A PVR from one of the major pay platforms already includes innovations such as ‘green button’ prompts to record a show, and ‘series links’ to record whole series.  Further recording innovations could include:

• ‘Record all key shows’ from the major channels. The platform could then make an editorial decision about which shows it includes.
• Record ‘More Like This’ to allow genre based batch recordings
• Record by artist or director … or
• Group Record – where a channel is running a theme through its schedule.

Many of these features are already appearing on next generation PVRs like Virgin Tivo.

Presentation Techniques
Until the arrival of Virgin Tivo, PVRs presented their output as dry lists of programme titles.  The on-screen presentation of these lists could be very dull compared to interfaces like TV iPlayer.   If we also assume that thes hypothetical new PVRs would be broadband connected and contain web-like rich media interfaces, it would  be a reasonably simple matter to include new options to:

• Present recordings by ‘channel’ – so that each channel’s recorded output could be presented on a branded page, in date order, by A-Z or by genre
• Include rich graphics and browse functions within recorded areas making them look more like VOD players
• Include rich metadata on recorded shows (in fact this is already available on the Virgin Tivo box)
• Include social media recommendations areas.

All of these innovations are within reach of the next iteration of STB manufacturers and pay platform systems, who are currently struggling to put together deals to include the FTA broadcasters on-demand output in their services.  By creating self-served push-VOD areas for all the major channels would not have to match the depth or functionality of the FTA online players to succeed. They would have to be just good enough to stop consumers wanting to visit them.

If presented correctly by the platforms, the activity described above would have to be treated as recording activity by the consumer. While a broadcast channel could prevent use of its logos on the channel pages, the only way that it could prevent this broader ‘recording’ activity would be to remove its channel from the platform completely. It would no longer be possible to be half-in and half-out of a pay platform’s system.

Not having to do VOD deals to offer on-demand outcomes must be an attractive proposition for anyone looking for a more simple life in today’s complex TV industry.

Filed under: PVR / DTR / DVR

Getting Under The Skin of Google TV

Given the frenzy around Eric Schmidt’s MacTaggart lecture, we thought you might want a second opinion on GoogleTV in the UK, from people who have a box installed in a media research facility (iBurbia Studios)  and who have reviewed and researched it with consumers and industry players alike.

The first thing to say is that this is a device that is mired in miscommunication and false perceptions. Many seasoned professionals are not clear what it actually does, hence the confusion about its potential competitive impact on the UK market.  The Telegraph told us yesterday that ‘the “Google TV” innovation will also mean that viewers can watch material from catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer and ITV Player on their main TV screen” ….seemingly ignorant of the fact that there are already 10 Million homes in the UK doing exactly that through PS3, Connected TVs and Freeview boxes from companies such as Fetch and Humax. There is very little new and innovative in Google TV.

The first thing to state is that, unless you buy an integrated TV with GoogleTV built in (and we haven’t seen any of those announced) Google TV will be an ‘add-on’ to any set top box you use, not a replacement.  It has no TV tuner in it so can’t receive broadcast.  (For info:  when you get it out of the box, it asks you which STB you want to use with Google TV, and goes off to find the right EPG data. You then have to run the ‘out’ cable from your existing STB into the Google box, rather than directly into your TV.  Then there is another cable that comes out of Google TV into your  screen carrying the combined Google and STB data). Most consumers will have lost the will to live by this point).

So, Google TV isn’t a complete TV platform.  It is really just a half-hearted, internet ‘add-on’ for anyone using a basic set top box that doesn’t have internet connectivity, or who don’t have one of the existing peripherals (eg PS3) that offer some of the same features.  This is just not a competitive proposition in the UK. It is unlikely to worry the UK’s pay platforms, who are rolling out their own intelligent, connected services.   It leaves Google joining a very busy fight for ‘free’ consumers, who have a lot of more credible options.  Consumers with an existing ‘free’ box, who wake up to the idea of having internet stuff on their TV, and don’t already have one of the alternatives, will have a choice of adding GoogleTV to their existing one; buying one of the new DTT  boxes  that do a similar job (Humax, Fetch, YouView, 3View); or buying one of the latest generation of Connected TV such as a Samsung or Sony Smart TV.

The big ‘plus’ of Google TV is that it opens up your TV to any web site – rather than the limited list the other companies are allowing into their devices.  However, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.  Beyond YouTube and the ‘player’ sites like iPlayer, 4OD and ITV Player, and a couple of movie sites (LoveFilm etc) there aren’t many sites that are designed to look good on the screen.  Most web sites that you go to will look crap.

Another big plus, albeit a bit geeky,  is its ability to integrate TV web players with Android apps on a smart device like a phone or tablet.   A good example is the ‘YouTube Remote’ app which lets you use a Galaxy Tab, or any other Android device, as a remote control for the big screen YouTube running through GoogleTV. A very cool integration but complicated to explain, complicated to set up and complicated to use. (It took three Decipher consultants a whole evening to get this working).

Decipher believe that, unless there is a miraculous re-design, it is likely that Google TV’s flaws will outweigh its benefits.  Its biggest flaw is its inability to integrate web sites with broadcast channels.  Broadcast and web are treated as fundamentally separate content types, with no links between them.  This flies in the face of all the development work being pioneered by YouView, Virgin Tivo, SkyAnytime+ and Freesat to integrate the two into a seamless content environment.  These ‘integrated’ platforms let you jump to VOD from the EPG, from within programmes, and let you search for VOD and broadcast programmes together, and then jump into them directly from the search results.  Google TV can’t do this and it shows that Google is only paying lip service to broadcast, not working with it. (Although at least they are not ignoring it completely like Apple TV).

There is clearly concern that Google will be able to generate a lock-down on TV advertising revenue and is important to clear this up.  Google will have NO impact on any ad revenue on broadcast channels (the major revenue stream by a long way on TV) – it has no technical or commercial mechanism for getting involved.  Also, Google will have NO impact on any ad revenue on the player sites consumers access through it (4OD, ITV Player, Demand 5 etc).  Once again, there is no technical or commercial way they can mediate between a broadcast web site and its viewers, even if they are accessing the player through Google.  Google won’t even be able to monitor viewing of broadcast or on-demand content on these sites (to create a new viewing metric to rival BARB).

This leaves the major commercial question being whether Google can leverage its power in search, in the TV world.  This is where the power of Google looks much weaker.    Any searches for product and services will most likely still be routed through laptops and smart devices, where consumers are able to follow through on complex transactions.  TV is a terrible medium for this kind of search.   Search on a TV can only really be used successfully to search for video content.  Given the dominance of broadcast channels and their related players in the consumption mix, the volume of commercially valuable content searches on a TV set will be tiny.  As with Hulu, if the UK broadcasters and platforms decide to lock Google out of the UK TV, they can.

So without a radical overhaul and the kind or breakthrough market redefinition that only Apple seem good at, Google TV feels like something that young, new media literate people will like for the quirkiness of it, but not something designed for mass roll out.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Are VOD deals worth the effort?

Nigel Walley – June 2011

We”ve been having a look at Virgin Tivo and having a think about what it means about the future of the TV landscape. Its begun to dawn on us that the implications could be quite significant.  Particularly as the pay platforms and the free-to-air broadcasters are finding it so hard to come to some sensible agreement about incorporating their catch-up services into the next generation pay TV services.   What Tivo and SkyAnytime+ show is that it might be easier if the platforms just ignored the broadcasters and used their PVRs to build their own versions of iPlayer and the other catch-up services.

How would this work?  We have previously looked at how BSkyB are using push-VOD to create an on-demand outcome in their Anytime+ service.  As PVR memory sizes increase, it will be possible for the pay platforms to use a form of push-VOD to remove the need for on-demand agreements with the free-to-air broadcasters.  The key will be offering the consumer new functionality by which they self—create an on-demand outcome.

A PVR from one of the major pay platforms already includes innovations such as ‘green button prompts to record’ and ‘series link’.  These are innovations that make use of the PVR easier for the consumer, but they don’t take away the key element which is that the outcome is still a consumer-requested record not ‘on-demand’.   The new PVRs also cluster the recorded shows together in folders, and let consumers arrange them in a variety of ways (eg A-Z, date order, or by whether a consumer has watched them already).  Tivo now uses the hard drive to offer Suggestions and Recommendations based on previous viewing behaviour (although these slightly break our new rule about these activities being clearly ‘consumer-requested’).

So hard drives are increasing in size (this week Western Digital today announced a 3TB hard drive for £100).   For now PVR memories  on the market have reached 1 Terrabyte, it is easier for the platforms to play with the extra recording space created.     It has dawned on us how easy it would be for the platforms to add new types of recording and presentation capability to create outcomes that mimic iPlayer, ITV Player and the others.

It would be a reasonably simple matter for the platforms  to include new options on a PVR to allow a consumer to opt to:

• Record ALL key shows from all major channels (letting me choose which channels to apply the functionality to). The platform could then make an editorial decision about which shows it includes.
• Present recordings by ‘channel’ – so that each channel’s recorded output could be presented on a branded page, in date order, by A-Z or by genre (as with the iPlayer menus).
• Include new presentation  functions (such as the browse film strip in iPlayer) within the channel areas to increase  the general utility of the recorded shows
• Include rich metadata on recorded shows (as is already available on the Virgin Tivo box).

All of the above innovations are possible with the current iterations of the pay platforms software.  The weak point is the number of available tuners.  Current chip sets would be swamped but Broadcom, and other manufacturers, have already announced chips with 5 or 6 tuners.  That is a lot of recording capability.  What’s even more interesting is that some of these features have been included in the revised Freesat / Freeview specifications within the D-Book and are creeping out into Freeview boxes.

But who would actually do this?  For the major pay platforms, the box strategy does not allow for continual upgrades.  It is hard to create a unified service strategy if all of your consumers are using different specifications of boxes.  The free platforms are unlikely to be allowed to do this, given their shareholder profile.  It is left to the smaller pay platforms  – Fetch, 3View etc- who may be able to use this capability to create a market difference.

The cumulative outcome of introducing them would be for the platform to have created self served push-VOD areas for all the major channels.  The key element being that  the customer should notionally opt-in to these functions.

These channel pages do not have to match the depth or functionality of the FTA online players to succeed. They have to be just good enough to stop consumers wanting to visit them.  While a broadcast channel could prevent use of its logos on the channel pages, the only way that a broadcaster would have to prevent this broader ‘recording’ activity would be to remove their broadcast channel from the platform completely.

Under this regime, it would no longer be possible to be half-in and half-out of a pay platform’s system.

Authors Addition:  Since writing this, Steve Jobs announced his iCloud initiative. This is where the world starts to get very interesting.  Could cloud computing arrive on TV?  Is cloud computing just what the TV industry would call a ‘network PVR’?   If I have a network PVR, could my hard-drive be ten times the size of my Sky 1TB box and have the recording functions mentioned above applied to all channels?  Are Sky and Virgin now going to have to compete with Apple to manage my online media?

Filed under: Distribution & Devices, PVR / DTR / DVR , iPlayer, ITV Player

Will Kangaroo Bounce Back?

May 2011 – Nigel Walley

So because of Twitter, we are talking about regulating new media again.  Apparently Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook man commenting on Twitter inspired legal frenzy!) thinks not.    I have to confess I am with him on this.  I can’t think of a single time the regulator or legal eagles has got a big call on emerging media right, and I speak from authority.  I used to work for NTL.

The UK media authorities, when setting up the cable industry, thought it was a great idea to copy the US model.  They created 50 regional cable licences, all across the UK.  No one seemed to take into account that the UK landmass was roughly the size of one US state. They created 50 tiny, uneconomic businesses in a market that wasn’t even sure it wanted pay TV.  NTL started the process of trying to stitch them together into a sensible company. It has taken the cable industry 15 years to solve the problem that the regulators originally created.

Two seemingly unconnected announcements this week bring this back to mind – the announcement by Arquiva that it was shutting the SeeSaw online video provider, and the announcement in this paper, that Xbox was considering establishing an open video player to aggregate catch-up content from the free to air broadcasters on the games platform.  It doesn’t take a great intellectual leap to spot the link between these two announcements.

You may remember that the only reason that SeeSaw existed in the first place was because of another mis-cued regulatory intervention. SeeSaw was born out of the original Project Kangaroo – a JV between the major free to air broadcasters (FTAs) to create a single online player for their catch-up content.  The whole industry juddered to a halt with amazement when the Competition Commission decided that the FTAs shouldn’t be allowed to build it.  It was the most short-sighted, regulatory decision since the cable TV decision. After the decision effectively shut it down, the remnants of the Kangaroo project were bought by Arquiva. (Is it only me that finds it ironic that the company that swept in to save a drowning Kangaroo was Australian?) After they sold off Kangaroo’s assets, the FTA’s went on to launch the YouView project, which is a project to …erm…aggregate the online players of the FTAs.  In many ways, YouView is similar proposition to Kangaroo, but this time via a set top box, not a PC.  Which clearly is different…ish.

Now the problem is that nowadays, any TV platform worth its salt is building a companion online player with various related apps.  For YouView rather than building one, merging SeeSaw into the proposition would have been screamingly obvious (Arquiva are partners in both and most of the content on SeeSaw came from the other YouView partners). The only problem is that YouView isn’t allowed an online player because the regulatory decision made on Kangaroo effectively prevented it from having one.  So SeeSaw goes down, while YouView ignores the problem that it will be uncompetitive without one.  Perhaps YouView could buy the SeeSaw equipment back again and store it, on the assumption that the regulator will eventually see sense.

A crazy situation, but a new problem is emerging back on Xbox.  Xbox needs to create a TV player because of some technical problems that make it difficult to launch a FTA player on the platform. Trouble is, there is already a TV player aggregating catch-up content on Xbox that could do the job – Sky Player.  It already has the on-demand content from UKTV, MTV and all the other channels I get on Sky). I really don’t want 10 different players just to get the full range of catch-up content I want, but the FTAs won’t give their content to the platforms’ aggregator players.  The argument would be easier to make if Virgin would hurry up and get VPlayer onto Xbox, no doubt followed by a Freesat player.  As an Xbox customer I could then just choose to use the aggregator from the TV platform I use… unless of course I am a YouView customer.

And anyway, iff Xbox create their aggregating player for the FTAs, are they not just recreating SeeSaw? Or is it YouView?  Or Kangaroo, or something.

The best that can be said for the SeeSaw outcome is that it reduces the number of brands that a consumer needs to navigate just to get some free to air content is reduced by one. The fact that we have three different brands () competing for the free to air TV sector is a balls up that we can’t lay at the regulators door.

Between competing egos, brands, players the market for TV in the UK is a bloody shambles and I am bored of it.

Filed under: Uncategorized

We’re Crawling Not Leaping into the 3rd Dimension

By Lloyd Mason – March 2011

Few innovations in TVs history have caused as much divisiveness as 3D. Currently the darling of consumer electronics, manufacturers and retailers far and wide are actively demonstrating this revolutionary new form of TV. However consumers don’t seem to be buying it; either the idea or the technology itself.

So what explains the public’s apparent lack of affection for 3D?  According to What Hi-Fi? magazine, 135,000 3D screens were sold in 2010, the first year the technology has really been available to British consumers. This seems respectable until you consider that nearly 10m TVs were sold in total and set sales were bumper last year due to the boost of the football World Cup in South Africa, always a driving point for sales of new sets. 3D sets totalled 1.35% of sales.

Now it is possible to give the third-dimension a break; it is a new premium (read ‘costly’) technology and therefore will only really demand the attentions of so-called early adopters. This determined group are also the section of the population most likely put up with shortcomings in technology and missing functionality. In comparison, Joe Public wants good value for money and a tangible upgrade before handing over the Mastercard.

The problems 3D must tackle in order to achieve mass consumer take-up are threefold.

Firstly, there is a distinct lack of content. For 3DTV at home there are three main routes to content – Blu-ray, on-demand and broadcast. 3D Blu-ray films have been slow to surface, about 40 were available at the end of 2010. On-demand 3D is available on Virgin and BT Vision’s TV services on a pay-per-view rental basis but have only 5 and 3 feature films available respectively. This explains why Sky has over half of the 3D population in the UK on its books. Offering Europe’s first 3D broadcast channel from October 2010 has meant that the satellite broadcaster can boast the richest bouquet of 3D content on offer; movies, sports, music and documentaries are all available each day and moreover, are recordable on Sky+ boxes. However, the 70,000 subscribers it has racked up on the Sky 3D channel are also paying subscription to Sky’s top-tier package at £62 a month.

This brings us to the second hindrance, cost. We have alluded to the topic twice already but it is probably the largest turn off for consumers that show any initial interest in getting 3D TV. Not only do you have to purchases a 3D ready screen, often with £80 glasses needed for each viewer, a 3D specific source is needed too such as Sky 3D or 3D Blu-ray player plus film.  This premium is mirrored in the cinema too where a 3D movie at Odeon Leicester Square will cost £18.60; rather than £15.60 for it’s 2D sibling.

Thirdly a lack of consumer education will also restrict sales, and though this like the other two problems will eventually be alleviated, is likely to be a more stubborn stain on 3D’s reputation. With a lack of industry standards in hardware (proprietary glasses, HDMI connections etc.) the process of purchasing can be complicated. Add to this reports of sickness and headaches (Wired report less than 20% actually experience discomfort) and consumers have an increasing amount of reasons to steer clear. This same problem was seen when high-definition TV first emerged and many consumers assumed buying a ‘HD-Ready’ television set rewarded them with HD TV content. The industry relied on retailers to educate consumers on the subject but felt they were slow to get their act together. If consumers are to understand and feel comfortable with 3D at home, they need to understand it rather than feel alienated by it.

Once 3D TV shakes off these issues consumers may begin to come around to the idea of having 3D in the home. However, if this takes too long it will have already been overlooked as a passing fad – it’s probably got a couple of years of consumer patience to play with.

However, even then it is likely to a remain a rather niche product. Event based broadcast such as sports and movies lend themselves well to 3D – they only last a couple of hours and can generally make the most of interesting camera angles and eye-popping situations; Eastenders in 3D doesn’t seem to make sense.

Consumers want to love 3D, and have done ever since it was first trialled over 50 years ago. It needs to address its many problems if it is to make any headway in 2011, until then it will remain a gimmick dipped into for sporadic events; there’s been no revolution yet.

Filed under: Future Content, Uncategorized , 3D, 3DTV, Future TV, TV

Canvas – My View on YouView…

By Nigel Walley

The Canvas project has come in for a lot of criticism in the market over the last few months.  Some of it, deserving and some of it self-serving.  However, I am concerned that few people seem to be looking at Canvas from the point of view of the consumer, who is already struggling to make sense of an increasingly confused TV market.

At the beginning of the Canvas project, the BBC made two statements which made sense from the consumers’ point of view.  Firstly they said that, while there was good provision of TV VOD in the pay arena, the market had failed to provide a solution for the ‘free TV’ market.  Now, while this was essentially a supplier-led argument (there was no research showing a groundswell of demand), they made the reasonable, and essentially Reithian, statement that it was incumbent on the BBC to step in and provide a solution where market failure had occurred.

The second point made was that, where TV VOD  had been provided in the pay arena (by Virgin, and BT Vision), it had been configured and presented in a way that was essentially ‘platform-centric’.  Using TV VOD made us feel good about the platform brand (ie Virgin) not the channel or programme brand. Canvas was an opportunity to create a ‘broadcaster-centric’ experience that made us feel good about broadcast channel brands.   We need to look at both those statements in light of what has happened.

Firstly, the market failure question.  When the first principles of the Canvas project were laid out in 2007, the statement that ‘the market had failed to provide a solution for TV VOD’ was true – there was no TV VOD for those customers who didn’t want to pay a subscription, and there were no announced plans for future products.  However, the Canvas project has been tortuously slow, and since 2007 the world has changed.  By the time Canvas /YouView launches in mid-2011 it will be just another product in an over-supplied market for TV VOD devices serving the non-subscription ‘free TV’ market.    As I write, there are already 7 or 8 devices on sale in the UK that can deliver a specially designed, ‘big screen’ TV version of the BBC iPlayer.  These include Freeview and Freesat boxes that are on sale in Tesco, John Lewis and M&S.  That is not market failure.

The ‘Connected Device’ manufacturers are also delivering TV VOD.  Every new Sony TV screen, and BlueRay disk player has iPlayer and YouTube built in and it is likely that the same will also be true for every Samsung, LG and Panasonic device.  On top of that, Every PS3 ever sold in UK can already access iPlayer. Before Xmas, many of these same boxes will also have access to a ‘big screen’ ITV Player, Demand Five and LoveFilm.   It is clear that these innovations have met the original Reithian need to distribute BBC content into the ‘free TV’ arena.

Not only do all these innovations give a lie to the canard repeated by the consortium members this week, that ‘Canvas will deliver VOD into the free market’, but they will actually compete against Canvas and make its success even harder to achieve. All this has occured before the launch of another, even scarier Canvas competitor, Google TV.  With all these innovations, it is not inconceivable that there will be over a million devices with free TV VOD in the market before Canvas launches.  Canvas can only justify itself, and survive commercially, if it delivers something significantly different and compelling into a market already oversupplied with TV VOD services.  This leads us to look at the second statement made at the outset of the project.

The idea that Canvas would provide a broadcast-centric way of presenting VOD was based on the notion that ‘the platform is designed and owned by companies that understand content.’  It spoke of a service in which the needs and interests of the free-to-air channels  and their brands, would be brought to the fore. This would benefit the broadcasters and provide clarity for the consumers who recognised and understood those brands. This is where the consortium has been in greatest danger of failing the consumer.

At the outset, the Canvas project was put into the hands of many of the teams who had launched PC VOD ‘players’ for the broadcasters. These were people who had built different and competitive brands to the broadcast brands that Canvas was meant to protect (think iPlayer, ITV NetPlayer, 4OD Player).  It seems that in the early days of the project, these teams were more interested in solving how to put their player brands onto TV, than working out how to use VOD to build strong broadcast brands.  In this model, a consumer looking for catch-up Eastenders or Coronation Street would use a YouView branded EPG to access an iPlayer or ITV NetPlayer branded service to find a programme originally delivered by Freeview.  Over seven days and they would be directed to SeeSaw. In this world, each VOD team was responsible for designing their own VOD areas, menu structures, and log-ins for their own players.  Given that ‘YouView’ is already an unnecessary extra brand in a market struggling to understand Freeview, Freesat, Seesaw, Fetch, and 3View, the early design outcome would have beens a cacophony of conflicting brands and EPG designs.  Most importantly it would have represented a failure of the consortium’s responsibility to deliver against the second promise to the consumer – a simple, broadcast-centric outcome.

Now it must be said that Canvs/YouView is likely to be the only player in the short term with catch-up content from all the free-to-airs. Beyond that, the only thing that can justify the Canvas investment, in an already oversupplied market, is if the design and presentation of the whole TV experience is a breakthrough of consumer clarity.  The service needs to point the way towards a 21st century channel brand experience, not be a vehicle to let the VOD teams build non-linear empires. My feeling is that common sense is breaking out, and that this is achievable.  (Particularly with the idea of an EPG that you can go backwards into yesterday with).  But it will involve formally deciding that the PC player brands have no role on TV where there is an existing player brand (eg YouView, Sky or or Virgin).  That is a big emotional step to take for many of the VOD teams, but crucial if Canvas is to succeed.  We will also have to resolve how YouView relates to Freeview and Freesat in the consumers’ mind. At the moment, it feels like the three organisations are competing against each other, not co-ordinating towards a single view of the future of ‘free TV’.  None of this helps the consumer and all of this is occuring at a time when the device manufacturers are looking to increase their consumer profile with devices that offer branded content services as well.

On behalf of the consumer, someone with a brand marketing hat on, (and no career path in VOD player development) needs to step in and clear this mess up.

Filed under: Uncategorized