For some time Faultline has been saying that there are a new group of power brokers in OTT TV services and named the foremost of them as TiVo; NDS, as a genuine pretender to the TiVo throne and a late entrant in the form of Rovi. Each of them taking the role of end to end enablers for pay TV operators to build OTT systems.
So it was with some surprise, and not a little entertainment value to see two of the combatants forced to sit side by side at Cable Congress and fight it out in front of an audience. The fairly witty Tom Rogers, CEO of TiVo since its first engineering focused CEO was pushed into the background in 2005, managed to fire off some old classic jokes, to leave the audience in good mood and wanting more, throughout an interview where he tried to position TiVo in the unlikely position as the friend of cable. But he was then bundled into a face to face with his own best European customer, Andrew Barron COO of Virgin Media, and up against NDS in the form of CEO Abe Peled and the Chief Technology officer of Liberty Global, Balan Nair.
Immediately all humorous banter was thrown out of the equation and shots were fired. Nair’s Boss, Mike Fries, never one to pull his punches, had gone on record back in May when he chose a combination of Samsung, NDS and Intel to provide Liberty’s next generation top end set top, saying that ‘to go with TiVo would have been a half step, when what was really needed was two full steps.’
The audience were expertly reminded of this throwaway line before the debate ensued which began restrained, but ignited when clear verbal hand grenades were lobbed from each side. Rogers tried to depict the difference between the two offerings as TiVO’s being the one ready today, and the NDS design, being something you might have to wait a while for. It seemed innocent enough.
Earlier in proceedings Liberty Global boss Fries had told Faultline that the Horizon Over The Top set top would be delivered late in the fourth quarter of 2011. In the original deal cut in May 2010 he had said that this device would ship in the first half of 2011, so this represents a 6 month delay to the project, and Peled clearly thought that Rogers was taking aim at NDS with his comments about being ready now.
Peled, in a personal aside later told Faultline that, ‘TiVo has only delivered a handful of devices to Virgin, and the first ones didn’t even have an Ethernet port. At least we know that NDS always delivers on time.’ Peled would do well to remember the first DVR that NDS designed, which after all was a copy of the TiVo box at DirecTV, for DirecTV ‘ was well over a year late. The track record here would appear to be with TiVo. On the other hand TiVo in a deal with Comcast almost failed to make the generous deadline to deliver a working version of its software on Motorola devices ‘ so neither is a paragon in this department.
But in front of the audience the two sides remained polite, on the surface at least, despite Roger’s initial discomfit at being press-ganged into the debate. Nair seemed to suggest that TiVo was light on the product brief saying that the Horizon box would be able to see content on a NAS box, the home PC, the TV set, a DVR and a handset, all discoverable and searchable and all communicating in IP and able to reach ANY IP end point.
Virgin’s Barron tried to calm the waters, saying that he had been forced to go with an off the shelf existing product because of the pressure the BBC’s YouView had placed on the Virgin effort. Youview is now a device itself subject to unseemly delays and has been recently pushed off into 2012.
Hasn’t Cablelabs failed us here, the interviewer asked? Surely there should be a standard for cable operators to use for OTT provisioning in their set tops ‘ no one agreed, despite the fact that for the most part cable operators have a set geographic territory and rarely compete directly with one another. ‘If that was the case we’d all be married to the same woman and drive the same car,’ quipped Rogers, and they all agreed that different markets need different UIs. Peled then mentioned that when he showed his Snowflake UI, he had shown 14 different versions to one prospect who was amazed.
Up stepped the quick lipped Rogers, ‘I’m not sure the technical people at the smaller cable operators are the best people to design UIs for new TV experiences,’ he said, ‘that’s a bit like being Zsa Zsa Gabor’s fifth husband ‘ I know what I’m supposed to do, in theory, but I’m not sure how to make it exciting.’
He was pointedly questioning Nair’s ability to design a UI, compared to the collective experience of TiVo and it stung. The gloves came off and it disintegrated into a debate about what do you do if the devices need to be upgraded into a home gateway as well? Replace them all? and very little more useful was learned from the discussion.
Interestingly another clue given by Fries of Liberty Global to the direction of the Horizon project was that the device was capable of having an open browser, so that anything that showed on the internet could be viewed, but that he has yet to decide whether to go open like that, in the manner of Google TV, or refer people to a closed subset of partner video sites, through Liberty search services. He could even do both. That makes a bit of a mockery of some of Fries’ earlier comments at the show, about how the Horizon device is the answer to Google TV and that it would stop it in its tracks, if it ever came to Europe. How can that be the case, if he hasn’t yet decided what’s in it. Maybe that’s the reason for Peled’s dismay, the delay not being down to NDS, but down to indecision.
One area where Nair re-assured the audience was on price, ‘It will come out at about the price of DVRs when they came out,’ or was that just another poke at TiVo, which after all brought out the world’s first DVRs? It’s hard to say.
The discussion goes some way to show how competitive this market it, and how emotional, and how these two efforts, plus the one we have identified at Rovi, are all in pole positions, but will have to fight set top makers, operator in-house ideas and both Apple and Google, as the OTT world develops, in order to taking a leading role.