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NAB Show: Super session highlights IPTV

Technology’s potential excites vendor, programmer and carrier

      

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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