One of the hottest topics at this year's Consumer Electronics Show was IPTV (Internet Protocol TV or Television-over-the-Internet), with many panels and exhibitors discussing this "revolution in television. "A survey by IBM showed that 40% of TV broadcasters felt "seriously threatened" by IPTV. Major film studios and TV networks have been busily appointing new vice presidents – of Digital Media, IPTV, Advanced Media, or something similar – to focus on this new business area. MTV even has a new "CDO" (Chief Digital Officer). Why all the excitement? And what role could the New Internet (IPv6) play in enabling this new business?
Why the Buzz?
There seem to be three main sources for all the excitement: a) independent content producers, who hope they can finally get their films and TV shows funded and distributed; b) major studios, who hope they can re-purpose existing content for new media and milk them for additional revenue – which they managed to do with the DVD market, including the release of television series on DVDs, and which they have started to do with TV shows sold over Apple's iStore; and, c) firms not in show biz such as telephone companies (telcos), search engines, and online content compilers that hope to gain revenues by getting into entertainment – in some cases, by stealing viewers from traditional content distributors such as cable and satellite broadcast media.
A major reason that IPTV may do better now than it did in the late 1990s is the increasing availability of Internet broadband, in more than 100 million households worldwide. Whereas many American households still have low-quality broadband (around 300-500 Kbps), several telcos are upgrading to 1-3 Mbps, and the 20 or even 100 Mbps broadband rates now commonly available in Japan and South Korea are pointing the way to the future.
Whereas the video-over-the-Internet in the past was meant to be watched only on desktop PCs, modern IPTV is intended to be watched on the big screen in the living room, using an interface such as a small decoder box as translator between the incoming broadband line and the television monitor. With increasing broadband speeds and improved compression, it is even planned to send High Definition Television to homes via Internet Protocol.
The market for IPTV is predicted to rise very quickly – from the modest levels of 2004 to over $17 billion by 2010, according to a report by TDG Research. Telephone companies would like to get a major chunk of this. IPTV offers a much needed new source of revenue, which the telcos hope to bundle with Internet lines and VoIP into a "triple play" – data, phone and television, all based on Internet Protocol, and offered as one bundle by your friendly local telco.
What is IPTV?
Internet Protocol Television is being defined nowadays as delivering digital video to viewers using the Internet Protocol over a broadband connection, either wireline or wireless. Delivering content via Internet Protocol has several advantages, including interactivity – realtime IPTV can turn television into a two-way process (sometimes referred to as a "lean forward" versus a "lean back" experience), allowing the viewer to interact with the content to achieve iTV (interactive TV) features such as commenting on the show or choosing a viewing angle (this has proved popular for football games in the U.K.).
Another advantage is convergence – using Internet Protocol for many different types of content (including voice/telephone, data and video) allows it all to be delivered using the same "digital language," so to speak, over one basic channel, which tends to be much more efficient than using the old analog means still commonly used for media such as radio or telephone. A third advantage, highly praised by indie producers and much feared by the suits in Hollywood, is availability – using the Internet, content can be made available to worldwide audiences, without the limitations to distribution posed by sending video content over the limited number of channels or the limited geographical areas available via conventional TV networks, cable or satellite.
The main physical components of an IPTV system are the video head end, the service provider core network and access network (e.g., DSL or Fiber To The Home), and the home network. The major players right now prefer dealing with a closed system (or "walled garden"), where one service provider controls all the nodes, so that the service provider can more easily monitor quality and collect payments. The disadvantage to a walled garden is that if you are not living in the company's service area, you cannot become a subscriber. The advantage, obviously, is control. One way that IPv6 providers could get into the IPTV game in the US would be to demonstrate to the content holders that both aspects are possible – that the New Internet can provide both control (for security and Qos) as well as the freedom of delivering to a larger audience beyond strict geographical borders.
Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of major paranoia for the major studios, who are afraid – with justification – that their video content will be copied in the same way that music is. Various methods of copyright protection are being tried, including allowing the content to be played only on a certain platform, such as a video iPod (for Apple) or on a PC (for Google). IPv6 advocates could score major points with the studios by showing that v6 could support creative new ways of protecting content, such as assuring that video can be delivered to and displayed only on devices with certain approved IPv6 addresses.
Watching Now or Later
IPTV can be delivered in two basic ways – realtime (also called "live" or "streaming") or non-realtime (also called "store-and-forward"). Companies such as MediaZone or Fashion TV offer realtime IPTV, and allow you to either pay for content or watch it for free (with associated advertising). Delivery of realtime content over mobile devices such as cell phones is expected to be a major part of the IPTV market. Realtime video can either be scheduled at specific times (like regular TV) or may be made available on demand (VOD). Video on Demand involves unicasting – sending a specified stream to a particular user. This is unfortunately very expensive – a high-quality TV signal can tie up most of a T1 line at the head end, even with the best compression techniques. This is tolerable for individual movies sent on a PPV (Pay Per View) basis, because the movie only lasts a couple of hours, and the PPV price can be adjusted to cover the cost of content and transmission.
Unicasting for regular television viewing – where a TV set may be on literally day and night – can however be prohibitively expensive, especially if the viewer is halfway around the world. It is chiefly because of these high costs that streaming video sent globally over the Internet has been of such low quality – perhaps 80 or 90 lines of resolution with 10fps, as opposed to normal home TV at 30fps and 400+ lines of resolution. An additional problem is lack of QoS – because the existing IPv4 Internet cannot assure end-to-end connectivity and testability (due to NATs and other problems), there is no system-wide way to assure the viewer that he will receive a consistent level of quality, such as he is used to with regular television broadcasts.
The New Internet was designed to fix many of these problems, with QoS to check quality, Flow control to smooth out delivery and multicasting to greatly reduce costs, especially for scheduled (as opposed to VOD) content. It is rumored that the Olympics in China will be one of the first major events to be netcast in IPv6. Strangely, many of the studios and transmission media companies in the US are totally unaware of the advantages they could gain in IPTV with IPv6. This is especially unfortunate because many of these companies are planning to spend billions in upgrading their infrastructures – in IPv4 format, which will then become obsolescent within a foreseeable timeframe. The obvious choice – upgrading to a dual-capable IPv4/IPv6 system – appears to be one of the best-kept secrets in America, at least in the "mahogany row" executive headquarters at US studios and telcos.
The inability to ensure high quality streaming video via the present Internet is a main reason that store-and-forward is currently the most popular form of delivery for IPTV in the US, with venues such as Apple's iStore, CinemaNow, iWatch-Now (which has older content such as The Jack Benny Show and The Lone Ranger), and Google offering thousands of TV episodes, music videos, films, games, video blogs and video clips, either for rent (where there is a limitation as to where and for how long the content can be watched) or to own.
Searching for IPTV
Although a number of aggregators and search companies have sprung up, and venues such as Google Video let viewers search by category or name, and provide helpful thumbnails of the videos, you can tell that video search engines are still in their infancy. "Discovery of content" was described as a major IPTV problem by many of the executives at the recent NATPE (National Association of Television Executives) show. Not being able to find content also translates into fewer eyeballs, which affects revenues, whether by advertising, subscription, or PPV (pay-per-view). Mainstream TV shows can generally count on millions of viewers, because finding content on them is a well-developed technology, especially with augmented search tools such as TIVO. It is to be hoped that search engines for online video will improve with time, and will eventually feature TIVO-like prompts to look for content that is similar to what a viewer is already familiar with.
Players in the IPTV Field
There are a great many new players moving into the IPTV field, and many more will make the jump in the months to come. Some of these moves will only make sense in the context of the expected large market size of IPTV. Cisco, for instance, a dyed-in-the-wool IT infrastructure company, recently bought Scientific Atlanta, a set top box maker, and is now suddenly in Show Biz. New video search engines such as Google Video (http://video.google.com) are now also netcasters, which will accept a producer's content and let him set the sale price.
"Google video will let you watch lots of high quality video on the web for the first time. You can search and browse, and we make it fast and easy for you to watch," said Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president, at the 2006 CES. Google Video partners to provide content include CBS, Sony BMG (for music videos), Greencine.com (for feature length independent films), Clearview, CareTALK, Fashion TV, Here! TV, HDNet, Hilarious Picks, Image Entertainment, iWatchNow.com, Kantola Productions, MediaZone, Plum TV, PorchLight Entertainment, SOFA Entertainment, Teen Kids, Trinity Broadcasting Network, WGBH, Wheels TV, and Wilderness Film India Ltd.
There are also many niche players. These include such portals and producers as JibJab (political satire), The Players Network (Poker and other card games), BlueHighways TV, iWatch-Now, and Trinity Broadcasting Network (and other religious broadcasters). Aggregators such as Wilderness Film India point to what will undoubtedly become a huge future American market – the netcasting of content from India, China and other countries with large immigrant populations in the US.
Many aggregators are looking for short comedy clips and other abbreviated content to put onto the Internet, in the belief that what the public wants in IPTV shows at this point in time is short format videos. Studios are playing on their branded shows by generating additional content to augment popular shows such as Island for online fansites. These short stories wrapped around branded shows are often called "webisodes." A number of new studios are developing content specifically for web broadcasts. Kevin O'Donnell, the president of such a company, TrueLight Entertainment (which has extensive experience in animation and interactive gaming), was a panelist on the IPv6 entertainment panel at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.
The largest IPTV operators until recently have been: NOW Broadband TV in Hong Kong, France Telecom, Fastweb in Italy, Skystream/NTT in Japan, and Homechoice in the United Kingdom. Major operators in the US in the near future will include SBC/AT&T (which paid Microsoft a reputed $400 million for IPTV software) and other telephone and cable companies, as well as search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo.
Major support companies for IPTV will include Broadstream Communications, Microsoft, Intel, Advanced Digital Broadcast and Motorola (which make Set Top Boxes), VBrick Systems, Alcatel, Ericsson and Siemens.
Future Technology
One of the major technology developments that will boost IPTV adoption is the availability of new hybrid cell phones, such as the Motorola MPx and the UT Starcom GF200, which can detect and use WiFi Internet connectivity. This means that a TV show that could be very expensive to watch with cell phone toll charges attached to it can now be watched inexpensively via a local WiFi connection, independent of the cellular carrier. Handset makers Motorola, Ericsson and 11 other wireless firms have developed the Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) standard, which lets phones automatically switch between cell and Wi-Fi networks. As soon as all cellular phones have the ability to receive WiFi (or its likely successor, WiMax/WiBro), IPTV will get another two billion platforms on which to show content.
The major technology development that will affect IPTV will be the worldwide deployment of IPv6, which will greatly facilitate greater quality control of video streams, will reduce costs (by introducing effective multicasting), and will enhance mobile user IPTV reception (by assigning permanent IP addresses to each and every mobile device, with transparent roaming). The Vista Operating System and Longhorn Server System, which offer many new features only available with IPv6, will also play a major role in the upcoming worldwide boom in IPv6-enabled IPTV.
Summary
It appears that in the US, content sent over the Internet will initially consist of repeats of branded shows, as well as short-form niche entertainment including comedy clips, sports, poker, music videos and weather. This will be followed by normal television shows being netcast via closed networks by telcos (with triple play packages) as well as other major distributors. Independent and longer-form TV shows and films for the global market will get a boost when IPv6 service as well as WLAN-enabled cell phones become widely available. This could facilitate a new age of opportunity for independent producers of creative content, who may be able to bypass today's major studios in distributing films to a global audience. Such producers will need a new generation of Internet search engines (and lots of promotion), to get their products recognized by a widely dispersed public looking at an ocean of new video content.
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