 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific I 2007 |
| Article no.: | 8 | |
| Topic: | Creating the ultimate IPTV user experience | |
| Author: | Ervin Leibovici | |
| Title: | CEO | |
| Organisation: | BitBand | |
| PDF size: | 356KB |
About author
Ervin Leibovici is the CEO of BitBand, a leading provider of Video-On-Demand, VOD, server solutions for IPTV. Prior to joining BitBand, Mr Leibovici served at SGI as the Regional Manager of SGI EMEA, responsible for SGI business in most of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Mr Leibovici previously held managing director positions for the Israeli subsidiaries of SGI and Cray Research, the supercomputer company. Ervin Leibovici is a frequent speaker at international conferences, such as Telco TV and TVoDSL, giving presentations on the IPTV industry. Ervin Leibovici has a BSc degree in Computer Science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology – and an MBA from the Rekanati Business School at the University of Tel-Aviv.
Article abstract
The home entertainment market is growing and becoming increasingly sophisticated. Entertainment is now available on everything from car radios to multi-media home theatres in an amazing variety of formats. IPTV, Internet Protocol Television, provides a low-cost way to offer DVD-quality, user and peer interactivity coupled with broadcast-grade content. IPTV personalizes the TV experience, facilitates buy-from-home TV-Commerce, allows on-line gaming and a wide variety of IP enabled facilities, such as keyword search, device independent viewing and on the move.
Full Article
Home Entertainment is no longer just the passive reception of content. It is now frequently coupled with user interactivity and peer interaction features. The IPTV, Internet Protocol Television, applications offered to subscribers will soon have to address the need to provide an individually tailored user experience, often simultaneously for several users in a single household, and at the same time provide a high level of viewing quality and availability. IP networks provide a unique way of offering a large, flexible and evolving variety of services via a heterogeneous, low-cost and secure network infrastructure. The growing availability and reduced cost of high-speed broadband make it possible to deliver high, DVD-level quality and broadcast-grade content over IP. Moreover, newer compression technologies are able to generate lower bit rate content while maintaining quality, thus allowing for improved usage of bandwidth resources. These new market – enabling technologies, coupled with fierce competitive pressures on telcos and service providers to create new revenue streams, are the driving force behind the growth of IPTV in the market. Telcos and service providers have already started offering advanced entertainment packages to increase customer acquisition and retention. In the triple-play package of fast Internet, digital IP telephony and video, true real-time, on-demand content delivery is considered by telcos to be one of the most lucrative value-added services. Commercially successful IPTV depends not only on offering and marketing the right mixture of content to the consumer. In order to support and promote the wide adoption of IPTV services, service providers need to aggregate compelling content packages while making sure that accessing and operating these services at home is intuitive and user friendly. Network infrastructure readiness and business models flexibility are additional requirements for a successful introduction of new-generation services. The following applications and services are examples of a different approach to improving the subscriber experience and forming the basis for new revenue-generating business models. Personalized TV – TV viewers, today, are overwhelmed by the vast amounts of programmeming and number of channels they can sort through. More and more, viewers are looking to gain a higher level of control over the availability of content, thus improving leisure-time quality. Personalized TV is an ideal service for those viewers who do not wish to zap endlessly through hundreds of channels until they find something to watch. A personalized profile can be created for each user and not just for each set-top box, allowing viewers to enjoy a personal selection of channels to choose from, with their individual list of preferred channels and areas of interest. A viewer’s profile can be pre-defined either by using information collected based on the user’s surfing habits or by using the viewer’s input. T-Commerce – Interactive TV applications can be used to allow viewers to purchase goods and services, again, based on personalized taste. Goods and services purchased can range from ordering a pizza to be delivered at home while watching a football match to using the remote control and set-top-box to handle banking transactions. This TV feature can be further enhanced using the individual viewer’s profile based upon data collected by the T-Commerce application itself. Advertisements for specific products and services can be segmented and presented to the viewers based on areas of interests and other relevant criteria. T-Commerce offers service providers options with even wider potential for new revenues, and gives them the opportunity to offer advertisers an extensive variety of charging models. P2P-TV – Peer to Peer TV, encouraging viewers to create ‘TV communities’ – links groups of friends in much the same way they already meet on the Internet or with their mobile telephones. While watching TV, viewers could send instant messages to their friends – by using their remote controls – to inform them about a special programme on a common area of interest, or alert them to an exciting moment in a live football match broadcast or advise them of a breaking news event. This application gives service providers an additional revenue source and ways to measure and increase content rating and viewer loyalty. Online Gaming – IPTV is an ideal platform for introducing either single or multiplayer interactive games. Similar to other advanced IPTV applications, online games can include a full range of community features such as meeting rooms, chat, high-score boards and contests. Games offered to TV users can be either newly developed for IPTV or ported to take advantage of IPTV capabilities, such as the intuitive remote control play, rich TV graphics and DVD-like quality sound. Introducing games lets telcos and service providers enrich the digital entertainment package they offer to consumers easily and provide an easy way to reach the large, casual gaming audience sitting in the comfort of their homes. Enhanced TV – In the future, new TV applications will be developed based upon the Internet model, which will give viewers a variety of search options similar to those used on the Internet. A viewer will be able to key in a search word and the search will find and display all of the relevant channels and programmes associated with the key word inserted. User interactivity and responses to programme content can be employed as well, allowing viewers to respond and vote in real time for favourite candidates, TV characters, reality show participants and competitive events. Examples of this include voting for a favourite performer at a singing contest or supporting a political spokesman at a pre-election debate. Applications and services such as these constitute a winning combination of World Wide Web features and those of closed telco networks. In this way, they provide the subscriber with the best of both worlds – access to the world’s largest content repository on their TV with the ease of selection the Internet makes possible and the quality of the broadcast TV viewing experience. IPTV device and location independence Several mega trends combine to ensure that fixed-mobile convergence, FMC, will soon be transformed from a subscriber dream and an engineering plan into an easily available day-to-day reality. First, there is a subscriber push for personalized ‘Everything on Demand’, pEOD. Subscribers want more content on demand, and the ability to personalize their selection as according to ‘my taste and my interests’. Second, our movement between the home, transit, workplace and other commuting activities defines the need to support a variety of end devices or terminals to which the content can be fed, in order to address the demand for ‘anytime’ access to content. FMC is expected to be the solution. For example, one can visualize a small child seeing a cartoon on the living room TV and happily agreeing to join the family trip now that FMC allows him or her to continue watching the cartoon from the car’s backseat screen, then continuing to watch from a PDA whilst sitting on a bench in the park and ultimately finishing to view the programme on the PC at the family friend’s house. Such a scenario only works if the viewing experience is automatically adapted to the different access devices and networks to ensure best viewing experience on each device. IPTV, what lies ahead To fulfil the promise of tomorrow’s TV, service providers need to harness technological advancement in their favour, present advanced TV products and enrich the digital viewing experience. The applications mentioned here represent only the first innovative steps towards the goals targeted by the industry and the subscribers’ wishes. Given today’s information and content overload reality, the ability to select and personalize the sort of content one has access to will be a key factor in both the viewer experience and commercial vendor success. As TV content and service offerings grow in size and sophistication, IPTV in particular and IP in general will become the platform for delivering these services – personalized, individually packaged – based upon advanced and creative business models. A growing variety of home devices, both fixed and wireless, will all be connected over IP and share content and services. We will see a growing number of subscriber driven applications and services that will lead to the ultimate TV experience – direct and unlimited access to any content, from any location, using any device, at any time.
