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Archive for the 'Digital Satellite' Category

Red-button advertising ends on Sky - but where does Anytime+ fit in?

May 5, 2010 by Barry Flynn

BSkyB’s sales-house, Sky Media, has decided to end ‘red-button’ advertising after nine years.  Sky is one of the best-known pay-TV operators offering this application, according to which viewers press the red button on their Sky remote control during a commercial spot to gain extra information about the advertised product, or to receive a brochure or sample in return for entering their details. At its peak in 2006, 160 such campaigns were running on the red-button service.

However, the service was always clunky - particularly when trying to enter personal details via the remote control - and the advent of green-button ‘bookable’ advertising, which allows viewers easily to watch and access long-form ads recorded on their PVRs or in parallel broadcast streams, has rendered the old service obsolete.

While hybridisation of Sky’s HD platform with broadband might have rescued red-button advertising by increasing its functionality and sophistication, comments made last week by Sky confirm that the priority is to use the IP connectivity of its installed HD base to launch a ‘true’ VOD service (‘Anytime+’) later this year.

Sky’s next generation of advertising technology will instead exploit the partitioned hard drive incorporated into later models of the Sky+ box to deliver targeted ad substitution, along the lines of the Sky AdSmart technology currently embedded in its online Sky Player product. This ‘push’-based targeting is unlikely to be very granular, perhaps only addressing homes by zone or region.

It will be interesting to see how Anytime+ integrates this model when it surfaces this year. Because of the quality mis-match between ads delivered over the air and over-the-top video, targeted advertising on VOD pre-roll ads is more likely to be inserted at source. But whether BSkyB’s aim is to make such ads more tightly personalised remains unclear.

Posted in Broadband, Digital Satellite and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments

MHP was no GEM: the jewel in interactive TV’s crown is likely to be the Internet

February 19, 2010 by Barry Flynn

Europe’s TV standards group DVB has designated GEM as its primary middleware technology in place of MHP - after standardisation body ETSI adopted it as a self-contained specification.

GEM - which stands for Globally Executable MHP - was, as its name suggests, a DVB-independent derivative of MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), a Java-based system originally proposed as a common European interactive TV platform.

Now, GEM becomes a standard in its own right, eclipsing MHP.

The original idea behind MHP was that its inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine would enable interoperability of interactive TV applications across different digital TV platforms. But in practice, MHP implementations turned out to be stripped-down, customized affairs that were only nominally independent of the platforms that deployed them.

MHP boxes also generally cost more than ones using interactive technologies such as OpenTV or MHEG, a factor which was exacerbated by an unexpected hike in licensing-fees in March 2006. MHP interactive environments also proved costly to maintain.

Thus, apart from MHP’s success in colonizing the Italian DTT market (the result of a government subsidy being made available for interactive set-top boxes), the middleware was never widely adopted.

GEM has now emerged as the more significant technology: (a) it is incorporated into the high-definition optical disc standard Blu-Ray; (b) it forms the basis for the US Opencable standard (under the brand ‘tru2way’); and (c) it underpins Brazil’s interactive middleware standard Ginga-J.

GEM is also compatible with the US and Japanese digital terrestrial broadcasting standards.

DVB claims that GEM/MHP technology is currently in around 50m devices worldwide, the vast majority of which are likely to be Blu-Ray players, in Farncombe’s view.

However, the trend towards hybrid decoders and connected TVs indicates that such broadcast-specific interactive TV platforms have probably had their day. In the future, interactivity on the TV is likely to use the broadband link and to derive from existing, tried-and-tested Internet technologies, with new standards such as Europe’s HbbTV and the UK’s Canvas pointing the way.

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite and Digital Terrestrial. 2 Comments

Higher TV viewing: DVRs may be the reason

December 17, 2009 by Barry Flynn

The UK regulator, Ofcom, has released international comparison data showing that the UK witnessed the highest average increase in TV watching during 2008 across 11 major economies, up by 3.2% to 3.8 hours a day. Ofcom also noted that the UK remained the country with the highest proportion of households with digital TV on their main set, at 88%.

It has generally been assumed that TV viewing is a counter-cyclical activity, because in a recession, consumers tend to cut down on going out and are therefore more likely to stay at home watching TV. However, the recession only began half-way through 2008, and although it was deeper in the UK than most other economies, this may not tell the whole story.

Ofcom’s second data-point suggests an additional factor: as digital TV penetration has increased in the UK, so has penetration of digital video recorders (DVRs) - and owners of DVRs watch more TV. Evidence from BSkyB’s Skyview panel suggests that users of DVRs watch in the region of 17% more television than their ‘linear’ counterparts.

Farncombe’s calculations (based on Ofcom’s quarterly digital TV reports), show that the number of DVRs in the UK (excluding Freesat) increased by 60% in 2008, putting DVRs in nearly a third of UK homes at the end of last year. This is no doubt contributing to the TV viewing increase noted by Ofcom.

This underlines the positive contribution on-demand consumption can make to viewing-levels increasingly under pressure in a traditional linear broadcast environment.

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite, Digital Terrestrial and Research. 0 Comments

Widevine’s new satellite investor points to the future for conditional access

December 14, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Widevine, a Seattle-based content security firm that offers software-based conditional access (CA) systems and DRM technology to the IP-delivered video market, has received $15m in investments from cable provider Liberty Global, Samsung’s VC arm (Samsung Ventures), and an unidentified corporation it describes as “the world’s second-largest satellite provider”.

Widevine is one of the global leaders in the software-based CA segment, alongside companies like Microsoft, Verimatrix, and Latens. The new funding is the third financial injection it has received since 2003. According to Tech Flash, an online tech portal based in Widevine’s home town, Seattle,  this brings total investments since then to more than $50m.

Since Samsung Ventures and Liberty Global are existing investors, the real news is that a major satellite company now sees a future for Widevine’s products.

Satellite networks are intrinsically one-way;  in Farncombe’s view  hardware-based CA systems using smartcards offer the most effective protection against piracy for one-way networks, rather than ones that depend solely on software.

However, satellite providers are increasingly equipping their customers’ receivers with broadband links which - if properly leveraged - can potentially offer better security using software-based systems such as Widevine’s.

This trend is common to other broadcast platforms, including terrestrial ones. It represents a major reason why Farncombe concluded in a recent White Paper that, “Since the traditional pay-TV world is slowly but surely mutating into a two-way one, it is likely that there will be a gradual shift away from smartcard-based systems in favour of cardless ones.”

This poses a challenge for the major global hardware-based CA vendors, such as NDS and Nagra, whose business has traditionally been based on the provision of smartcards to operators.

Posted in Digital Satellite. 0 Comments

Canalsat and Sky - who needs a dish?

November 23, 2009 by Barry Flynn

French pay-satellite operator Canalsat is to offer non-subscribers access to a subset of its satellite channels over the Internet. Called Canalsat Web TV, the service is separate from the Canal+ VOD service Canalplay, which is available both in ‘over-the-top’ mode and integrated into French ISPs’ IPTV offerings.

Canalsat Web TV offers 63 of around 300 channels available from Canalsat using a dish and decoder. When launched a year ago, it was only available for free as an add-on for Canalsat customers subscribing to its top tier. Now non-subscribers can pay €25/m to access the service, with existing subscribers to the lowest Canalsat tiers paying €7/m extra.

The Web service - which is also available on the iPhone - offers less choice than its satellite equivalent: a mid-range Canalsat tier offering 230 channels via satellite is currently available for €23.90m. However, Canalsat Web TV comes with no strings attached: subscribers can enrol or churn out every month.

The Canalsat move closely resembles a similar initiative by BSkyB in the UK, which opened up its online Sky Player platform to non-subscribers in October. Entry-level is €18/m for just 20 channels.

Both can be seen as experiments which seek to establish the price consumers are willing to pay for the utility of ‘untethered’ viewing of premium channels anywhere in the home, in an environment devoid of contract tie-ins. Such offers also fulfil a secondary purpose for the operators: for existing subscribers, additional, more flexible viewing options help to keep them from churning and migrating to free OTT video; while it’s also an opportunity to showcase premium content to non-subscribers without requiring any commitment.

Posted in Broadband, Digital Satellite, IPTV and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments