Last week at Cable Congress in Brussels, ADB hosted a workshop on the state of Pay TV in 2015. The outcome?  It seems pretty clear where we are heading as an industry in whole. Basically it is Pay TV for ALL screens, the question is how?

Some say cloud, some say gateway, either single or distributed. Everyone says more OTT is in our future!

We would say that we are actually getting more stability in home networking then in cloud APIs. After all, for home networking, it’s IP, then the DLNA or Apple ecosystems. For the Cloud, we have HTML5, not finished, DRM (which ones?), umpteen different cloud APIs and then the wonderful argument about who actually controls the applications running on the devices. Maybe that’s what dictates that we need a gateway for the moment. Ultimately, apart from decent bandwidth, all we really need for the cloud to work is stable standards, and our industry doesn’t really have a great track record where those are concerned…

We’ve spent a few years now loading the user with complexity, making them manage their home network, or remember where their content comes from in order to find it… It’s time to simplify, making things just work for them and adding more services than just quad play.  There’s much more value to be squeezed out of broadband yet.

I guess that the good news at the end of day, is that there’s plenty of life in Pay TV yet and plenty to do!

Is it me, or has anybody else noticed something strange happening in our industry recently?  All of a sudden so-called ‘Smart TV’ manufacturers, OTT providers and wannabe broadband service providers want to be a pay TV operator!

But wait, weren’t we told not too long ago that Pay TV, as we know it, is broken?  Weren’t many of the technologies and services that now appear to want to be heirs to operators’ thrones been vaunted as its killers?  So why does everybody from CE vendors to search engines now appear to want in on the action?

Perhaps because even though subscriber numbers have fallen from their record highs of a couple of years ago, revenues have, in the main, continued to rise.  Why? Because the ‘killer app’ in TV is video and video is hot right now!  Perhaps, because consumers don’t want to replace traditional Pay TV with an alternative that offers one subset of the content they receive from their operator.

Consumers want both traditional broadcast video, and Internet and OTT services, and on-demand video, and user generated video and pictures – all for viewing on their large screen TVs, tablets, smartphones and PCs.

So, while many have predicted the end is nigh for Pay TV operators it’s worth remembering three things:

• Consumers like choice: first, while there appetites for internet and OTT video has grown in recent years [driven by the availability of new services, rather than a cultural choice] the majority still continue to want access to premium Pay TV
  channels.
• Delivering multiple channels of high definition video into consumers’ homes is hard to do well.  Adding OTT and Internet services to an existing Pay TV offering is, relatively, easy – the same cannot be said the other way around!
• Consumers will not tolerate the same video experience they do with Internet video and OTT services from a pay TV provider.

To those that predict the death of Pay TV I say one thing… not so fast!

YouTube has killed TV – at least it has if you believe one infographic that has been doing the rounds in the last few weeks. Delve a little deeper and you find the statistics used to support the claim are a little, well, over the top! It claims that: (more…)

It seems like there are new statistics about the meteoric growth of connected TV every day at the moment. Just in the last few weeks we’ve heard that 80 percent of televisions shipped by 2015 will be connected – up from 27 percent last year; a claim of 8
million Yahoo-connected set-top boxes are, apparently, already in the market today; and 100 million hybrid broadcast and broadband set-top boxes shipping in 2015 alone.

I’m not going to get into the debate about how many connected TV’s are actually connected [I'll save that one for another day!] but amongst all the hype and statistics, it appears that a number of key questions have never been asked… So I’m going to ask the most important ones:

• Is everybody using the same definition of connected? Is the most commonly used definition really what consumers want?
• It appears that everybody is using the term to describe anything that is connectable to the Internet – to deliver any of a host of over-the-top services; as well as Internet video and applications. But is that really connected TV? I’ve found that connecting services to only one screen in a world where almost everyone has a home network is both illogical and frustrating. How many offer consumers the ability to transfer any, or all, of the different video services with second, third, or fourth screens? How many can offer the promise of a truly seamless TV-like experience?

While smart marketing might offer consumers the promise of a truly connected TV experience… I believe, for many, the
consumer experience will prove to be a particularly disconnected one.

In the lead up to Cable Congress 2012, taking place on 7-9 March in Brussels, Cable Europe speaks to Paul Bristow of ADB. Paul is the VP Strategy, Middleware and Consumer Experience and shares his thoughts on cable’s challenges for 2012. Paul urges operators to focus their efforts on advancing standard set-top boxes to bring a whole-home multi-screen experience, including integration of both live and on-demand TV services to a variety of smart devices such as smart phones, tablets and games consoles. The full interview can be seen here

Advanced Digital Broadcast is delighted to announce that we are sponsoring Cable Congress 2012, taking place this March (7-9th) at the Square in Brussels, with a special workshop.

We invite you to the ’3 Years is a Long Time in the Pay-TV Industry – Or is it?’ workshop taking place at Cable Congress on Thursday, 8th March 2012 at 1.15pm.

The session is free of charge to all Cable Congress attendees.

This interactive workshop aims at examining what the Pay-TV landscape could look like in a few years down the road, and how operators can start planning to deliver a compelling new TV experience to its subscribers. It will consider what this really means in terms of simplifying the overall user experience and exploring what the cable industry needs to do to deliver the promise of multi-screen.

The workshop will be hosted by Paul Bristow, VP Strategy, Middleware & Consumer Experience. He will be joined by Krzysztof Bilinski, Executive VP, General Manager Broadcast Division and Serge Dulhoste, VP and General Manager EMEA Cable Business Unit.

See you in Brussels!

If there is one thing our industry needs to take away from CES2012 it is this statement from The Next Web’s Brad McCarty in his piece titled, ‘…Proof that 3D still sucks and brands don’t understand TV.’ It is, perhaps, the most important commentary on our industry in many years.

While I don’t know whether I’d go as far as Brad in relation to 3D – I agree it’s certainly not ready for mass market audiences just yet, but wouldn’t write if off completely – his assertion that anything that makes the enjoyment of TV more difficult can
only spell trouble. I’ve been saying the same thing for many years.  It is, admittedly, sometimes easy to get carried away, amid the hype for connected TV, social TV, TV Apps and 3D TV, to name a few – all of which I believe will play a role in the future of our industry – that our primary focus must remain on delivering a compelling televisual experience. If we lose sight of this I believe we stand to lose the most important people in the success, or otherwise, of our industry – the viewers.

If this happens, everything else will simply become a footnote in the demise of the television.

How many times in the last couple of years have you heard somebody predict the death of the set-top box? I tried to work it out the other day and very quickly ran out of fingers and toes… So, you can imagine my delight when analyst Kurt Scherf declared that he believed that the death of the set-top box was somewhat premature at the Parks Associates Connections Europe event last November.

Working in our industry I’m used to hearing a constant stream of FUD [Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt], First it was VHS remember those?] was going to bring about the demise of television. A few years later, the same prediction was made when the
DVD arrived. In recent years the internet was predicted to bring about the demise of the TV. Unsurprisingly however, the TV is still with us and, according to reports, is more popular than ever before. More recently it’s been the Connected TV set that has been seen as the heir to the set-top’s crown.

In my post earlier in the year, ‘The set-top box is dead… long live the set-top box‘, I talked about both the evolution of the set-top box and why it would continue to be a key part of the connected, multiscreen, hybrid [insert your favourite buzz word] TV experience for both consumers and operators for many years to come.

Given the direction of our industry – towards hybrid broadcast and broadband-delivered services – both operators and consumers will need a device with which to manage them and distribute a multitude of services to a growing array of devices, from TVs to PCs and portable devices. While the name may change – from set-top box to home [or residential] gateway, the set-top box is here to stay!

I wrote a couple of blog posts earlier in the year about the cord-cutting phenomena and my belief that the future of television will be hybrid. In the light of a couple of recent news stories I thought it was worth revisiting these topics.

First, the news that Charter Communications CEO Mike Lovett announced on the company’s latest earnings call that, while video remains a critical part of the business, he considers the firms primary function to be providing connectivity.  This supports my assertion in my earlier post that consumers are less concerned about who is providing the pipe and the services that are delivered via it. They want both connectivity and services – and want the best [read simplest] consumer experience to make it quick and easy for them to enjoy the content.

Equally, a pipe with no content, whether that’s a traditional ISP or PayTV operator, that provides ‘broadcast’ video will, I believe, find it increasingly difficult to win consumer hearts and minds. Time Warner’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes’ announcement that providing their consumers with SVOD services like Netflix and Hulu, alongside its more traditional PayTV services, actually helps their business, rather than harms it.

My piece, OTT hype signals a hybrid TV future talked about the need for PayTV operators to embrace streaming services and
that offering them alongside their traditional channel bouquets was, I believed, a recipe for successful business growth in an increasingly competitive video world.  It seems like an increasing number of operators and service providers are seeing a similar
vision of the future and taking advantage of the benefits a hybrid strategy can deliver.

The further we go along this OTT path the more it seems like OTT providers are turning out to be like TV channels. They are becoming just another content providing player in the TV space, which just like any TV channel may, or may not, be included in
any specific Pay-TV offer.

ADB has announced that it will deliver its intelligent wireless ADSL & GBETH gateways and Epicentro software to TEO LT, AB, the largest provider of integrated telecommunication, IT and TV services in Lithuania.

ADB Broadband has been supplying TEO with its broadband devices since 2009, and will now add state of the art Intelligent Gateways using its Epicentro^® software stack with OSGi framework and Network Application Portal.

The Application Portal makes it very simple for consumers to transparently install home network
applications from a dedicated “application store”. Example services include energy management, home automation, home security, health-care and more. Until today, these applications required complex software installations and an always-on PC. Read full press release here