We’ve never thought of the Personal Computer as being that personal and have gone on for years about the mobile handset being the natural place to keep all your personal information. Always the big problem has been to get that information into and out of your phone.
One thing Faultline suggested about five years ago, was that the mobile phone becomes the remote control for your TV viewing and about a year ago the first applications on the iPhone came out which achieved this at AT&T.
Verizon isn’t even the next company in line to follow suit with its announcement this week, but it is significant that a second major IPTV player (although many still don’t see what Verizon does in FiOS as being IPTV) has joined the fold. The relationship between viewing any form of video, and your most personal device is now set to enrich and become a major platform for reducing churn in both quadruple plays and eventually among any cellular operator.
Right now the issue is one of changing channel, and that’s where it starts. In order to do that there needs to be a simple local data channel which can cope with command signals, and wi-fi, being largely ubiquitous in the modern home, appears to fit the bill. There could be some interesting games played with this, for instance when dad wants to watch the football game, and commandeers the TV, what with the reach of wi-fi being around the entire house, the disappointed son, little Johnny, who wanted to watch something else, might signal all the way from his bedroom to change the channel, do it repeatedly to the frustration of Dad who won’t know what’s going on. But of course such teething troubles can be sorted out.
But already this simple matter of allowing channel change presents some more complex hurdles. Certainly if you need to choose a channel you will eventually need to see an EPG, but at first a simple scroll up and down channels will do. But it makes most sense to at least sync your favorites list between the phone and the TV set, so more data needs to change hands. Actually, eventually, there will be no need to keep a favorites list on the TV at all. Families keep secrets from one another, like the son may keep the fact that he has been watching porn channels or unsuitable age group films from his parents.
On your mobile you’d be fine having a ‘real’ favorites list, but on the TV, where it can be scrutinized by anyone, you would only keep a sanitized version. But of course, the TV can start holding versions of favorites lists which are perhaps NOT visible to just anyone holding the remote control, instead they will have to be holding your phone.
The FiOS service goes someway to doing all of this already. It only works with the Motorola Droid or HTC Imagio handsets which is clearly because you need somewhere, in this case Android Market, to download the application from. It allows a phone owner to change channels, manage parental controls, pause, rewind, fast forward or set the DVR to record a TV show.
But FiOS has already taken in more use cases, such as photo sharing between the phone and the TV.
What we have always heard that people are working on, and which never seems to come to prominence, is the ability to move TV programming from the TV system to the handset. This needs to work in at least two ways ‘ there needs to be a high speed transport to store the programming ‘ and this needs to be in multiple sizes. HD content might be scaled down to the respective screen size on the handset, if that’s where you are going to watch it, or it can be maintained at a higher definition so that it can be played out on another TV set from the phone at some future point.
We’d expect this to come one step at a time, and the fanaticism surrounding the protection of HD content right now from pay TV companies, is likely to mean that the next step we’d look for is the downscaling of the content to the phone, using it either for playout, or as a carry case for SD only versions of content. It might be that most operators resend a new copy of the program over wi-fi from a central internet held store, though getting it from the set top would be preferable.
It is here that you look for a set top company that is also a mobile handset maker and arrive neatly at Motorola ‘ set by 2011 to be two companies, one which will retain this double act of handsets and set top manufacture.
This has already been addressed by Motorola’s co-CEO, Sanjay Jha, who has this week been intimating that the entire Motorblur, interface will arrive on the set top. He is probably seeing this as one way, at least in the near term, that of allowing consumers to do just what they have done at Verizon, share photos, video, and other multimedia which sits on the handset, with their TV, through their set top.
Remember the other major feature of Motoblur is to mix all forms of messages together in one stream, and to offer multiple social networking links on any one device. So once again this is seen as being one way, from the phone to the TV set, and not yet vice versa.
Motoblur runs on most of the company’s Android handsets such as the Motorola CLIQ on T-Mobile, but not on the Driod from Verizon Wireless, which has built its own interface.
Another feature that FiOS is offering is one which again will cause irritation among other family members ‘ the fact that when the phone is answered, it can be set up to automatically turn down the volume on the TV set for the duration of the call, maybe mute it completely. AT&T already shows the incoming call identity on the TV set as well. Combine these and we have the opportunity for disaster.
Someone calls your 15 year old daughter who you’ve banned her from seeing. She then takes the call, and no-one else can hear the TV, so instead sit there smoldering while she tries to explain to the caller that the entire room is listening, before they say something they shouldn’t. Naturally the phone owner will leave the room for privacy leaving the entire room waiting for their return, while watching a muted screen. Can their handsets pause the screen and divert it to spool onto the DVR, or will that capability only be allowed on the phone which initiated the TV program? It’s these types of problems that the DLNA was set up to solve, so we supposed it will develop use cases for this.
The other application that this is crying out for is one where the phone hijacks the ‘picture in picture’ capability of the IPTV service and directs thumbnail videos to the controlling handset (Or any other handset), so that either the EPG or the neighboring channels can be viewed on the handset. That way we can flick through channels on our phone without irritating everyone else, and we can ALL do it, in parallel while watching the end of a program. In the worst case scenario each viewer might watch a different channel on their phone, getting sound through earbuds, while Dad is watching his football game.
That is technically feasible for a system that only has one or two tuners, although in IPTV there is no concept of a tuner, it is about a multicast connection and you can be connected to as many multicast connections as your broadband line is capable of bringing you. Both Verizon and AT&T (and later half of the civilized world) has video thumbnails created for them to push towards an EPG being a set of moving video pictures and to allow picture in picture.
This was facilitated by the encoder suppliers such as Tandberg and Harmonic doing multiple encodes at the point of video ingest from a satellite feed. These are then each sent out in the video multicast stream.
So at IPTV operators there already exists the delivery mechanism to create and bring down mobile phone sized screens. The other way to do this is to use up an entire tuner (in cable or satellite) in order to resolve a TV channel and then shrink this by dropping 3 out of 4 pixels to create a QVGA screen. This wouldn’t get us very far, as you are usually using one tuner to watch something and one to record something else and most systems today are dual tuners only.
However that’s probably the type of solution that cable and direct to home satellite systems may have to adopt.
The final application perhaps needs more than Wi-Fi, though possibly not, and this is the copying of a completed program from a DVR to a handset. For years we hoped this would be Ultra Wide band, with speeds up to 1 Gbps across a room, which would have meant about an 8 second download for a one hour SD TV program. At wi-fi speeds, especially given that it loses so many packets around the home, that kind of transfer is difficult at any time, and likely to result in impoverished video quality.
Of course if it has already been downscaled for viewing on a handset, the 100 Mbps of 802.11n is perfectly good for the 200 MB to 250 MB sized files that an hour’s viewing might take up, taking perhaps one or two minutes in real world copying speeds. This needs to come down to the time that it takes to put your coat and shoes on when you leave in the morning, because it is a major solution, almost as big a step as TV Everywhere (getting your pay TV programming free over the internet) has been for cable and satellite in the US.
But the big obstacle here to any video traveling in the other direction, from the set top to the phone, is DRM. Which is why we get so excited when Motorola’s handset division is set to end up partnered with its TV set top business.
There is no reason why the handset cannot be given the same types of video decryption keys (or media entitlement messages) that the set top has. Motorola has defended these with its life at times in the past, and although cable operators always wanted other devices to be able to decode video from a Motorola head end, it took something like 3 years of haggling and negotiation before Pace was allowed to make a set top that could decrypt the Motorola conditional access system.
But of course this could just as easily be a phone app that sits in Android Market, and result in a copy of the TV program that can be transferred to a handset, and decoded there, but with a ‘copy never’ policy enforced on it, like entertainment on an iPhone using Apple’s Fairplay DRM.
Now there will be those who argue that conditional access is stronger where there is hardware involved in the storing of the decryption key, but of course a handset has many different types of hardware. It is being considered as the basis of a credit card and payment system, using the Single Wire Protocol and a near field communication radio system. The Java virtual machine on the SIM card of 3G handsets is considered as safe a place as any on the planet for holding a secure identity.
There are ways of making this safer still on a phone, but who wants to make specialized hardware just to better protect TV programs which are already the subject of considerable piracy and in a format too small for content owners to worry about. With the advent of Place shifting and the fact that it is here to stay, and the creation of TV Everywhere (even if it gets crushed in the US due to anti-trust) attitudes to content shifting from a truly strong encryption system to just an okay one, are softening, and we think that during the next year or so, these early experiments with phone TV interoperability will blossom due to people’s reaction to them.
Suddenly when you get home you won’t be able to switch off your mobile and plug it into re-charge in your bedroom. You will have to charge it downstairs by the TV. And if your phone is with you, you will fiddle with it, and that will result in more texts, more data interactions on Facebook and a broader communication during TV viewing. All of which cellular operators will certainly endorse.
It has taken the availability of both the iPhone and rival Android devices to create the various App Stores that begin to make all of this possible, and now triggered we’d expect to see phone TV interaction gathering increasing attention throughout the next 24 months. It’s been a long wait.