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Carrier Services
NAB Show: Super session highlights IPTV
Technology’s potential excites vendor, programmer and carrier
by Jim Barthold
Things have changed so much with the National Association of
Broadcasters that they put aside time for a NAB Show “Super
Session” to highlight telco-delivered IPTV. That the session
offered more hope than reality when it comes to IPTV, and
completely ignored the complexities of obtaining content and
franchises, was almost irrelevant as even the broadcasters
got a nod from the optimistic panelists representing a vendor
(Hewlett-Packard), a programmer (Disney) and a carrier
(AT&T).
When asked point blank, they said that local broadcasters,
already threatened by their own parent companies
circumventing their local channels by putting popular
programming content on the Internet, should not fear the
potential for a multi-screen IPTV experience delivered by a
telephone behemoth.
“They’re (local broadcasters) very important to what we offer,”
said Dan York, executive vice president of programming for
AT&T. “They live in a world that’s changing.”
One thing that won’t change is that the local content will end
up as part of the telco’s programming lineup much as it has
with cable operators for more than a half-century. What could
change is that content could end up on a mobile screen or a
PC screen as part of that same telco’s bundled offering.
That, too, is not necessarily a bad thing, if the local
broadcaster “finds ways to teach customers on the devices
that they’re using,” York said. The Internet, he said, “has
changed the game on all of us.”
Local broadcasters, he promised, “are not going anywhere
soon but they have to keep an eye on what their consumers
are doing.”
If the three panelists have their way, those consumers will be
consuming content from television, Internet and mobile
screens provided by a telephone company and it would
behoove that telephone company to use its IPTV prowess in
new and different ways than more traditional service providers.
“We have home entertainment models that we want to see
IPTV open up,” said Art Hair, CTO of the Walt Disney
Company studios. “It’s one more way that we see we can get
our movies to the customers.”
One of those ways will be via mobile devices; an area which
York believes differentiates AT&T from its cable brethren.
“That will actually cross different service providers” and
present “a whole group of partners we have to figure out how
to get the content to,” York said.
If anybody really wants to watch it.
“The walls are much more broken down with the younger
demographics,” York said.
Still, said Brian Levy, vice president and CTO of
communications, media and entertainment for Hewlett-
Packard the idea of watching live television—or some form of
video on a two-inch screen can be attractive to an older
audience as well.
“It’s a fantastic experience to watch it on a small screen when
you’re really bored to death,” he said of viewing mobile
content while trapped in an airport.
Overall, IPTV, in the ideal world that the panelists were
presenting to the broadcasting industry, will bring the best of
the Internet to the television and take the best of television
to Internet devices, blending the lean back and lean forward
experience and “striking that great balance between the
keyboard but, if they don’t want to use the keyboard, enabled
by the thumb (on the remote control),” said Hair.
It will not, or should not, be an individual experience, Levy
warned, and user-generated content, the bane of cable, the
threat to local and national broadcasters and the force that
potentially clogs the broadband pipe “could create an
enabling new ecosystem for IPTV” if there is “the right
balance for the consumer and the provider. It’s not about that
replication (of existing TV) it’s about something new.”
For local broadcasters, at their own show, the super session
offered a super warning that they’ll have to do something
super new if the nirvana these panelists were predicting
actually comes to reality. Even if it doesn’t, the local
broadcaster can expect a different experience when IPTV
comes to town because, as nearly everyone at this show is
saying, it’s not your father’s or grandfather’s telephone
company anymore.
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