About 5 years ago on a wet Sunday, Faultline sat down and wrote a speculative piece about the future of content. It turned out to be nonsense. You see the central logic was that IPTV would be deployed for the good of the consumer, and we innocently thought that Telcos would take this onboard.
What we speculated was a series of services, beginning at the content owner, which allowed for automated discovery of content, automatic inclusion into aggregator web services based on some form of automated auction and marketplace software, which would set prices based on popularity, and then automatic inclusion ‘ with the right language file ‘ in any IPTV service around the world. It appeared to us as logical and well within the capability of Web 2.0 oriented thinking. After all there IS software out there that can do this sort of thing.
The trouble was we were thinking with our web hat on, not our Telco Service gateway hat which works to the rule of ‘where there is a choice, always seek to impose a walled garden.’ Also the presumption was that content owners WANTED new routes to market. How na’ve we were back then.
So it was with some surprise that we noticed this week that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has given first stage approval to a new standard which enables an IPTV end user to locate and subscribe to content, coming from different, independent service providers. We were surprised because it is just another thing that most Telcos will have to find and disable before they launch an IPTV service and which content owners will be baffled by. But they shouldn’t be.
In a world where everyone is trying to find the magic device which will convert video on the internet to the TV, there is a simple logical route for such video, in through the Telcos Broadband Remote Access Server (internet server), on to the IPTV VoD server, with scrubbing and cleaning and reformatting happening under the control of IMS in the network (even using negotiation and mediation to locate and acquire a better or cheaper copy of the same content if need be) and then out across the IPTV QoS controlled access network to the TV. It sounds complicated, but it’s well within the capability of existing IPTV systems. In fact Mediaroom told us two years ago that it has tools to do this, and that it was building up its eco-system of partners who could work for Telcos to add any content they want, but in the Mediaroom world it must be added by the Telco and be part of the Telco TV services.
If this had been Google or Apple or even Nokia building that IPTV system, they would have built a system which was controlled by the consumer and to hell with the walled garden, whereas Microsoft, which gets too much of its Mediaroom revenue from just 20 Telcos, felt, quite rightly, that it had to make these tools available to operators for them to choose.
The problem is that from talk in places like Faultline, to code written by IPTV gurus and developers, to the sales force addressing the Telco, back out to an implementer, and then back to the Telco for filtering and commissioning content ‘ it is just too long a journey, and it’s a journey which can get sabotaged or sidetracked or just lose its funding.
Which is why pure web models will always win out over Telco models, and why some device ‘ like the Intel 3100 chipset, and the Yahoo TV Widgets ‘ which is both simple, cheap and most importantly, operate entirely under the control of the end user ‘ preferable with a set of external developers involved, like those who drive the Apple App Store, will always get to the right service model first.
Anyway the ITU standard is built to enable end-user choice and is published as ITU-T H.770 – Mechanisms for service discovery and selection for IPTV. Hope it gets used one day.