|
Backoffice & OSS
TelcoTV: IPTV, Off-Net Content Still Muddled
Industry Searches for Balance Between Web and Traditional Television
by Jim Barthold
IPTV, while named for Internet Protocol, isn’t an Internet
service and can’t be run like one, a panel “Me TV: Exploring
the True Power of IPTV,” concluded at the TelcoTV Conference
in Dallas.
The panelists, including representatives from AT&T and
BellSouth – unattached, at least for this session – admitted
that there is reason to worry that the open Internet model
could influence what consumers want from IPTV. On the other
hand, they agreed, this same model can help IPTV
differentiate itself from other TV delivery forms like cable and
satellite.
“We have to find that happy medium,” said Lee Friedman,
director of IPTV applications for BellSouth. “We don’t know
what the killer app will be. There will always be something new
that comes up.”
Jeff Weber, vice president of product and strategy at AT&T
Operations agreed with his potentially soon-to-be colleague.
That happy medium includes taking advantage of many of
the features of the open Web – particularly powerful search
engines – and incorporating them into IPTV offerings.
“Our expectations of what we can do with video cannot be set
by what we can do on cable or satellite or even IPTV,” said
Friedman. “There are gobs of video out there and no good
way to navigate it.”
There’s Google, but then that could be perceived as a threat
to TelcoTV because it would not necessarily be part of a
monetized telco subscriber offering and it has video like
YouTube that doesn’t bring in any subscriber or advertising
revenues.
“You had better be able to play in both spaces and, more
importantly, the blended space,” said Jeff Weber, vice
president of product & strategy at AT&T Operations, who
bristled at the suggestion that AT&T and other
telcos would have to outdo search engines like Google.
“I don’t think we have to be better than anyone on the
Internet,” he said.
Telcos, the panelists concluded, have a clean slate to offer a
differentiated service that walks the middle between television
and the Web.
“We are very focused on putting infrastructure in place … and
finding that content and putting that out there for our
customers,” said Weber. “We’re starting to turn out attention
to what’s next … all of that content that’s out there.”
At the same time, the telcos are not trying to see ahead to
what their subscribers want and provide it.
“If we’re in the business of trying to think up the next killer
app, that’s a bad place for us to be,” said Weber, opting
instead to promote an environment that creates a
platform “that is open to all third parties” who want to develop
content for both the Web and the IPTV network.
|
