We know that the globe over, in every walk of TV, there is a requirement for an operating system for the TV. What would such an operating system do? It would offer a consistent interface for interactivity at the device so that voting and gaming were possible, and that links would work on advertising, taking you either to more information or even to the web.
It would be nice if it also supported a standardized interactive EPG, offer information services such as sport and stock tickers, enabled E-commerce with secure transactions, a well as education services and E-mail and internet access from the TV.
We know that satellite, cable and telco TV players want this, because they spent the past three years trying to create a universal standard. But just to make sure that it didn’t work they gave it two separate names and decided on two separate ways of charging for it ‘ MHP and OCAP, recently renamed as Tru2way.
It is a universal rule of marketing that if something doesn’t actually do one key ingredient of the requirement, you name the product to suggest that the missing ingredient is ALL that it does. So Tru2way is about not having a decent two way interactive dialog. In other words it’s two way, but not really.
This ‘not really’ part has now been addressed by a consortium of cable operators, working with Sony, to offer Really Really True two way, which of course will be different from all the Tru2way devices out there, will involve a mild re-engineering of US cable’s network design, which will take over a year and will allow for interactivity not just with broadcast programming, but also with VoD and DVR and interactive programming guides.
The extra parts will have yet another layer of intellectual property licensing and will delay the mass uptake of interactivity on cable TV for perhaps another device generation.
What’s interesting about all this is how there is a clear and concise agreement on what would constitute a common interface to bring new attractive services to the consumer, and then the whole world swoops and tries to sabotage it because each player wants total ownership of the idea.
It reminds us of the old story about writing a computer program, told in six diagrams. The first is entitled ‘What the user wants’ and it is a picture of a swing hanging from a tree. The next picture is what the systems analyst specified and it is a picture of the two ropes holding the swing, but they are tied to different branches each side of the trunk, so the swing cannot swing unless it goes through the trunk. It goes on like this until the final picture is ‘What the IT department delivered,’ and it is a tree with a section cut out of the trunk, and a peculiar looking ‘Heath Robinson’ cartoon of something that clearly won’t work but meets all the criteria.
The very idea of a set of intellectual property holders including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, allowing a license that is fair to satellite direct to home operations or which works with Digital Terrestrial system is a contradiction in terms, but they are pivotal for mass uptake of Tru2way and MHP which were supposed to work off the same code base as one another ‘ essentially a Java client on a set top or built into a TV set.
The fact that DTT and DTH and IPTV services all have higher license fees for the same code was a decision that only a committee with two cable operators could condone, and it effectively smashed the potential for the MHP version ‘ the one to be used on non-cable platforms ‘ to have any chance of life.
We can almost hear the conversations, full of carrot and stick. We want it engineered this way, because we will give you huge orders if it is engineered this way, and our networks are easier to do two way activity, because we already have the cable modem on the same line, so we should pay less.
It is a nonsense and as we have talked to people in Europe during the past year MHP has become a word that make most of them spit. It was seen as a holding action to stop them going ahead and creating a real interactivity platform for TV. In other words it was a Trojan Horse for the cable industry.
At Faultline we are more circumspect about the TV having an operating system, because we worry that so much time, effort and energy has been invested in talking about interactivity, without it really doing very much to improve programming. And this has happened over such a long period, that it may just be that interactivity is really about convincing advertisers that TV can deliver genuine ‘click through’ leads, analogous to the internet. But even if that’s all it delivers, it is a long term revenue holding action that TV has to invest in, but to do that it needs ubiquity ‘ it needs to be everywhere ‘ and to do that it needs a standard, and that standard must not cost the earth.
Which is why the simple statement this week from the DVB Project saying that Via Licensing, the agency which is managing the MHP license will no longer charge anything to free-to-air broadcasters, brings a glimmer of hope to wide scale MHP implementation in set tops and TVs across Europe.
The uptake of broadband lines in Europe has reached 50% of homes in some countries, and it is this return path that makes interactivity assured, but the only technology likely to overtake that broadband statistic is the uptake of DVB-T, predicted to reach something like 44% of homes, right the way across Europe by 2012, having overtaken the 50% market in the UK already and has reached almost 30% in France.
DVB-T services tend to be free to air, and the return path requires a broadband line, so this move is an attempt to drag the consumer electronics giants into the mix, putting MHP into cheap hybrid DVB-T devices, and getting the various publics ready for some form of interactive tools.
So in a sense, the totally unpromising start for MHP and OCAP (or Tru2way), could be turned around, and this standard may end up as the tiny standard ‘that could’, rather than the skewed standard that ‘never was’.
We have looked at the supposedly altered Via Licensing web site and the device fees are still there at $1.75 per device, staggeringly high when you realize that DRM and MPEG regimes don’t nearly cost half that, and when the core technology provider, Sun (the whole thing is written in Java) is not charging for anything except an existing Java license.
Subscription based service providers for MHP are charged $0.25 per household per year plus a small upfront fee.
Back in December the DVB Project was upset with the lack up uptake of MHP, and the license fee was lowered from $2 per device to $1.75 (compared with $1.50 for Tru2way) and talked of its frustration with the entire MHP process and said that it was going to re-assess just which patents were required.
Initially the companies that were beneficiaries of the license revenues were Comcast, OpenTV, Matsushita, Philips, Samsung, Thomson, France Telecom, Microsoft, T’l’diffusion de France, Teracom and Time Warner Cable but today the Via Licensing web site has a reduced license footprint, with Thomson, France Telecom, Microsoft, T’l’diffusion de France, and Teracom missing from the list.
Does this mean that at some point in the future the consumer electronics device makers will all get legal actions from this group, claiming that their patents are being infringed? It might. Because in the end, there are around 1.25 billon TV sets installed and a replenishment market of around 200 million a year and at $1.75 per device one day that might be $350 million a year that they are missing out on.
The same may also apply to these companies suing operators around the world for their patents, with similar stakes.
And after all that, the very fact that cable Tru2way has already diverged from the standard with the US Sony deal, suggests that interactivity will not be universal, and that cable operators and satellite operators will have to offer slightly differing feature sets, as well as a differing code base for the software ‘ so there are still snags on the horizon.
However if the huge DVB-T base, likely to end up as the largest set top base of devices globally, shifts slowly towards this standard, in tandem with digital cable operators (which mostly means the US with the rest of the world following five years later), then the consumer may suddenly get a sniff of what is possibly with a decent TV operating system, and come to expect it on every device of this type. That in turn will drive the widescale uptake of components that support it, and the device volumes that are needed to scale.
While the US cable industry has made the best of its Tru2way opportunity and made a noise to attract developers and device makers alike, the MHP response is perhaps late in the game, but may wrest at least some of the initiative away from the US, or risk its TV services moving a clear step ahead of Europe.
Already Comcast Media Center has launched a centralized platform called HITS Advanced Interactive Services (AxIS) designed to support interactive application developers and facilitate the launch of interactive services by smaller cablecos and is working with developers Zodiac, Vidiom, TVWorks, Alticast, Biap and others. This recent decision to make MHP free to free to air broadcasters is perhaps expected to trigger similar initiatives in Europe.