Time to get going

Have you got an excellent idea for an iPTV concept? Well, then, you could do worse than entering Deutsche Telekoms iPTV competition with 1 million euros in prize money.

iPTV is gearing up, but I believe we should be looking at what can be done with iPTV that will set it apart from other means of television - regular, mobile or what have you.

Best of luck, and see you at the awards ceremony later on ;)

BTW - Deutsche Telekom, if anyone of you are reading this - the starter kit looks really really technologically heavy. Now, I know that it's important to know what ratios are possible to include, and that JPGs work but PNGs don't and suchlike. But please - do NOT scare away the creative minds too much! What you want are GOOD IDEAS! You do NOT want things that look good and fit all the technological requirements but are lacking in content!

If you need some consultation regarding this, you know where to find me :)

Miro challenging Joost, Babelgum et al

New kid on the block, Miro, is trying to challenge Joost, Babelgum and the rest of the bunch with its slightly different take on things. See. Miro is first of all an Open Source internet television app, formerly known by the much-less-savvy name "Democracy Player" (I mean, that's NOT a selling name, Miro ftw!). It also has some other nifty features, and a whole different look to it.

It's campaining with the actual tagline "Better than Joost" - pointing out that they have 2.500 unrestricted channels, loadsa HD material and are open source. Valid points, all of them.

The thing that makes Miro stand out in a positive (albeit probably fairly illegal) way from the rest of the pack is the possibility to subscribe to RSS-feeds of favourite tv shows. Just grab the RSS feed from somewhere, set up a channel on Miro and the app will take care of the rest, providing you with a new episode every time one is available. For a users guide, check out this CNet article.

My 2 cents would be that Miro will work as a good partner to Joost. It can get to stuff that Joost can't, and it can do it with a minimum of hassle. To just watch something - without really knowing what to be looking for, just killing time - Joost is still better. Also Miro crashed a couple of times on my laptop, whereas Joost has been running faultlessly for the past year - might just be me, but the feeling I get is a little bit unsteady.

Miro - try it out! Just don't get caught :)

This is where you would've seen a picture of a show on Miro, but alas! you only get to see the app itself. Oh joy, oh rapture.

Babelgum, the new Joost (even though there IS no Joost on the market yet :)

Hi ho Silver!

Funny thing, that. As soon as someone comes up with something, someone else does as well. Just have a look at Babelgum, a service now in Betatesting (just like Joost), that is set to "blend the lean-back experience of traditional TV with the interactive and social power of the Internet" (just like Joost), offering 2cutting-edge peer-to-peer technology to stream video to your PC safely and efficiently at near-TV resolution" (just like Joost) and lost of other stuff (just like Joost).

As I'm not (yet) betatesting Babelgum, I can't comment on the service itself, but William Cooper over at informitv is testing both, and has a pretty good review here. By the looks of it, what the consumer would REALLY like is a blend of the two. Which is about as likely to happen as a sudden and everlasting peace in the Middle East, or some such thing.

Well, as a future consumer of TV over broadband, I'll just say that the more people are working on getting these things to work better and better, with niftier and niftier widgets and GUI:s, the better. Keep'em coming!

Betatesting Joost

Started beta-testing Joost today. First impressions:

- a lot like what I would expect from a well founded IPTV venture
- slightly dodgy on the picture quality, most probably something that will improve. Still way better than other competitors out there.
- EPG needs some working on, suggestions, reviews, ratings etc should help the viewer more
- good feel of the service, nice layout, well constructed as a whole
- some really nice widgets, but I'm sure there'll be lots more around soon

Will look forward to testing it a lot more! As of now it gets the thumbs up, definitely. Let's wait and see what happens.. :)

IPTV World Forum - preview

Well, it's gearing up for one of the specialized IPTV events of the year, the annual IPTV World Forum, to be held at the Olympia in London on the 5-7th of March. Anyone who is interested in IPTV for one reason or another (for my part I couldn't care less about the technologies involved - all I want is working IPTV to everyone on this planet, as it would make my job as a developer of interactive television shows so much simpler. Or, rather, not simpler, but offer a lot more opportunities...)

With over 5,000 visitors and 200 exhibitors, there should be something for everyone at the Forum. Highlights, as far as I'm concerned, are panel discussion such as "Making the most of on-demand and iTV" and "Revenue generators and killer applications". Some of the keynotes might also be worth listening in on - but as for the exhibitors, there is almost exclusively technological companies with set-top-boxes, middleware etc. Content for IPTV is nowhere (on the other hand, MIPTV is coming up in mid-April).

But what would really get me personally going would be some showcases of the possibilities that IPTV can offer, especially when thinking about developing tv formats, as the possibilities for interaction etc are much greater with a broadband connection connection the viewer to the broadcaster. Some of that, please!

Joost - why not?

Well, Joost is looking good. The project formerly known as The Venice Project (as written about on this blog in mid-December) is generating quite a stir on the IPTV-market.

See, Joost is a Very Good Thing [tm] for PC owners (and Macs as well). It uses the P2P-principles of Bittorrent, for example, to give IPTV to the world. All you need is a 500 Kb/s line and you would have perfect broadcast quality - which is just fabulous. For a pretty good review of the possibilities, the pros and the cons, read this story from The Register. Also revealed today are new content deals for Joost, enabling them to offer content from Paramount Pictures, MTV etc.

Conclusion? This is a pretty darn good development of the home computer, helping to turn it into the media center of the home in a much better fashion than, for instance, Microsofts attempts. But - for television to be good and for television to be something that people want to watch, it's just not good enough with a technologically perfect system. We need good television programs as well. Let's hope the Joost-people remember this.

Mobile market and IPTV

Analysts are always pretty keen on analyzing things, I've noticed. For the most part many of the reports published can be ignored, or at least put in the read-at-some-point-if-there-is-absolutely-NOTHING-else-to-do heap.

A couple of reports this week seem quite interesting, though. First of all, Informa have released a report regarding the mobile market and the high probability that mobile operators will be missing out on the opportunity to get their share of the enormous amount of revenue to be made in that market over the coming years.

The report states that mobile operators should NOT try to be something that they are not - meaning that they should stick to what they know, offering mobile coverage to their customers and billing them for it. To get into the content part of mobile media, the best thing is to form alliances with companies providing such content - not to start developing and offering such content themselves.

Pretty straightforward advice, right? I'd be following it, were I a mobile operator :)

Another report, from Strategy Analytics, states that IPTV will reach 80 million subscribers by the year 2011. This does not contradict earlier reports, but the interesting thing is that this report suggests that more than half of the IPTV subscribers will actually not pay anything for their IPTV. Instead, most will be bundled up in triple-play subscriptions offered by the telcoms, including broadband, VoIP and IPTV all in one package.

Now there's an interesting situation - where will the money to make IPTV programming come from then?

What to do this year...

Well, in a strictly professional way of looking at things, there are quite a few interesting conferences and meetings one could attend. If funds would be available, and time as well, that is... :)

A cornerstone in the television industry year is NATPE, the National Association of Television Program Executives, and the biggest industry meeting in the US of the year. This year held at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas on the 15th-18th of January, they will - apart from the usual buying and selling - devote the whole of the first day to mobile television. Could be fairly interesting, with subjects ranging from "lessons learned from the IPTV roll-out" to "Alternative Reality: Does Primetime Still Matter?"

Keeping up the steam nicely is the Mobile TV World Congress, to be held in France on the 23-26.1.2007, concentrating on one of the most hyped things around at the moment - mobile television.

The IPTV World Forum, to be held in London on the 5-7.3.2007 is also mighty interesting. The three days are themed differently - day one is "Making a business of IPTV", day two is "Competitive Services" and day three "Threats and Opportunities". Could be well worth to check it out, seeing that many of the leading figures and companies in the industry will attend.

And then, of course, we have the one to dwarf them all - MIPTV featuring MILIA, this year to be held fairly late in April, on the 16-20.4.2007. With close to 13.000 people attending and business reaching multi-billion dollar levels, this will be quite a good place to be.

That's what the spring looks like - so pack your bags and let's go! ;)


* * *

One more thing - the melding and meshing of media has never been this intense. The latest news report that the Sundance TV Channel will open up a screening room for its offerings in Second Life - an online MMORPG. Pretty neat, and also just another step towards the future, where media itself becomes less and less important (no more "am I hearing this on an mp3-player, on my phone, on the net, or where?" or "hmm wonder if my DVD-player supports .wmv-files?") and the content is what matters.

Bring it on, I say. I, for one, cannot wait.

One more IPTV-venture for the road...

Heard about The Venice Project? It's a funky little peer-to-peer IPTV venture, or, as they themselves describe it:

"We are in the process of launching a secure P2P streaming technology that allows content owners to bring TV-quality video and ease of use to a TV-sized audience mixed with all the wonders of the Internet. All content on The Venice platform is provided by content owners directly, and it's all protected with the highest standard of encryption and we are working within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) framework to ensure that it complies with appropriate content protection and ownership regulations."

Now, one interesting thing - apart from the fact that P2P-IPTV is a nifty idea in itself - is that this project is rumoured to be the new project for the guys behind Skype. That would make some people sit up and take notice, I'm quite sure.

Anyone interested in betatesting The Venice Project, feel free to sign up - I just might do it myself, for the fun of it :)

A small step for man, a HUGE step for IPTV

So, here goes - the long-awaited roll-out of British Telecoms (BTs) IPTV-service, scheduled to roll out next Monday. The service has been somewhat delayed, with the first roll-out planned for summer 2006, a schedule that later became the slightly more ambigous "sometime this autumn", which now has been confirmed for Monday December 4th.

The triple-play service will reportedly be slightly down-scale, with broadband access, over-ip-telephone calls and some channels and tv content available on demand.
It'll be available first only to BT broadband subscriber, it'll run on a Philips hybrid set-top-box running on Microsoft software.

Now, this is all new territory for BT. But in the market for IPTV, it's quite a big step - one of the biggest players so far to really start up this seriously, with a plan for the future. During spring 2007, if nothing's gone wrong, expect BT to feature heavily at, for instance, MIPTV, racking up content and distribution deals. The success or failure for BTs Vision-service will be closely monitored by the other players globally - not only "does it work", but also more importantly "are people interested", "will people pay for it" etc.

My two cents? I think we'll see Vision gaining momentum, providing the technology - soft- AND hardware - is up to it. In a years time, they'll have a million subscribers, offering a bundle of live tv channels and lots more on demand. And a jolly time will be had by all.

Except Sky then, of course ;)