Category Archives: IPTV

VimpelCom’s ‘Beeline TV’ IPTV service launches in Russia with Microsoft Mediaroom

Posted by Barry Flynn on May 12, 2009 No comments

Russian telco VimpelCom, which tied up an agreement with Microsoft to deploy Mediaroom just under a year ago (see our previous post), has launched its Beeline TV service – the first implementation of Microsoft’s IPTV technology in the Russian/CIS market.

The move follows a successful commercial trial of the Microsoft platform by VimpelCom under the Corbina TV brand. Corbina Telecom is a subsidiary of VimpelCom.

Intriguingly, Microsoft’s original press release about the deal said the service would launch in ‘mid-2008′ – a statement we repeated at the time. Connected TV now assumes that was a typo! Otherwise, there’s been almost a year’s delay. Microsoft has now told Connected TV that a mid-2008 commercial launch had indeed been envisaged, and accepts there has effectively been a delay of nearly a year. Microsoft puts this down to the fact that it had agreed the trial with Corbina Telecom before its acquisition by VimpelCom.

Whatever the precise reasons for the delay, the deployment is a potentially major one for Microsoft: Beeline currently has in excess of 800,000 broadband subscribers in Russia, but the VimpelCom Group also has companies operating in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Armenia.

As of September 30, 2008, VimpelCom’s total number of active subscribers in Russia and the CIS was 57.8 million (including 45.1 million in Russia, 5.6 million in Kazakhstan, 3.1 million in Uzbekistan and 2.4 million in Ukraine).

Beeline TV subs will be able to access typical PVR functionality, some 3,000 on-demand programmes and movies, 125 channels (including 4 HD channels), as well as soccer matches from the Russian Premier League, Russian Championship and indoor Russian Championship.

Subscribers to the Beeline TV service will be offered the base package (100 channels) for 270 Rubles (€6.16) per month and the advanced package (125 Channels) for 495 Rubles (€11.29) per month with on-demand shows from 5-100 Rubles (€0.11-2.28).

The trick-mode trigger: a new paradigm for TV advertising in an on-demand world?

Posted by Barry Flynn on April 1, 2009 2 comments

As the traditional TV world migrates to an on-demand environment (‘over-the-top’ or otherwise), the evidence so far has been that where viewers are given the opportunity to, they will generally fast-forward through the ad breaks.

Various strategems have been adopted by broadcasters and advertisers to get round consumer resistance to interruptive advertising, generally involving some sort of implied bargain. For instance, the benefit of being able to make up for having missed a popular programme by viewing it in ‘catch-up’ mode is commonly set against the fact that the ads in the catch-up stream can’t be ‘zapped’. Similarly, if you want to watch an on-demand movie without any commercial breaks interrupting the action, it’s often impossible to skip the ‘pre-roll’ ad welded onto the front of it.

Well, on the evidence of three separate exhibitors at last week’s IPTV World Forum, a new paradigm is evolving. It hasn’t got a name, yet, so let’s invent one: ‘trick-mode triggers’ (you heard it here first).

The idea is to exploit the fact that on-demand viewing allows viewers to interrupt their own viewing by using VCR-like ‘trick modes’ such as pause, rewind and (yes) fast-forward – the very feature causing the zapping issue in the first place.

Connected TV has already mentioned the use of the ‘pause’ function in ANT’s Amazon application, which triggers a window showing ‘contextual’ DVDs or books available to purchase at the Amazon store. However, NDS – the private technology firm owned by the Permira Funds and News Corporation – also featured it when demonstrating the latest version of its Infinite TV technology, which Connected TV reviewed after its first showing at last year’s IBC trade-fair in Amsterdam.

Geoff Todd, NDS’s director of sales and new business initiatives, referred to it as ‘on-pause’ advertising. In the example he demonstrated, pressing ‘pause’ during the replay of a cookery programme created a Flash-based wrapper around the video advertising a relevant ingredient. In fact, this type of trick-mode related feature has been implicit in Infinite TV’s targeted advertising platform from inception, although the capability wasn’t emphasised at IBC.

The platform allows the effectiveness of different types of targeted ads (e.g. ‘pre-roll’ versus ‘on-pause’) to be compared, and their subsequent application refined. “[Infinite TV tells you] which kinds of ads have been consumed,” said Todd. “If trick-mode works better, you can pull the pre-roll or mid-roll ad.”

The third example at the show came from set-top box manufacturer ADB, which was showing Stream Group’s Solocoo online TV portal being accessed from one of its hybrid DTT-IP hybrid models.

In the demonstration shown, the trigger wasn’t the result of trick-mode use, but instead arose when the viewer decided to use the familiar left-and-right arrows on the remote control to check what was currently playing on adjacent channels, using the mini-EPG at the bottom of the screen display. At this point, the mini-EPG displayed a YouTube icon, which when the red button was pressed, offered a choice of relevant YouTube video-clips to play back. The relevant factor, however, is that the call-to-action was displayed when the viewer chose to interrupt their own viewing.

As we have noted here before, interruptive advertising may be something of an aberration – one reason viewers dispense with it when they can. But placing advertising or other calls-to-action in the breaks viewers create for themselves as part of their on-demand viewing experience could well prove to be much more acceptable – particularly when the trigger invokes contextual promotional material.

(NB NDS is a sponsor of the Connected TV blog)

IPTV World Forum: AT&T U-verse and the multi-room, multi-screen, networked future

Posted by Barry Flynn on March 27, 2009 No comments

Day Two of the IPTV World Forum began for Connected TV with a presentation from Griff Parry, director of on-demand at BSkyB, who (as Sky executives are always prone to at such events) ended his remarks by playing the audience a glossy promotional video. This showed how a typical multi-screen Sky household in 2012 might be consuming the pay-TV operator’s content.

Parry cautioned that some of the functionalities the promo displayed – which included amongst other features personalised EPGs for each family member, and the ability to pause a PVR-recorded programme in one room and pick it up from the same point in another – would not necessarily be available within a three-year time-frame, if at all.

Interesting, then, to contrast this take on the future from one of Europe’s leading TV technology innovators with a presentation to analysts at the end of the day from Franz Kurath, AT&T’s executive director of broadband content and converged services. This showed, among other things, that the ability to swap PVR content mid-play between different TV sets – a relatively distant possibility, according to the Sky presentation – was already a reality for US customers, through AT&T’s Microsoft Mediaroom-powered U-verse IPTV platform.

In addition, U-verse’s Total Home DVR allows up to 5 HD streams to be viewed simultaneously, said Kurath – two being consumed live, with three being streamed off the Total Home DVR. This box acts as the master, with standard U-verse receivers attached to other TV sets acting as ‘slaves’ – although the user experience on each TV set remains identical. The same recorded show can also be accessed, played back and controlled independently on up to 4 separate TV sets.

Such technology does not come cheap, of course. As Connected TV noted in a previous post, AT&T has twice had to scale back the U-verse project, increasing its spend on the rollout (to close to $5bn) while reducing its coverage. And though U-verse now has more than 1m subscribers enjoying its advanced features, AT&T admitted in its Q4 08 results that it now expects to reach its previously announced target of 30m homes passed, in 2011 – a year later than originally planned. Currently, it’s passing 17m.

Will the investment have been worth it? AT&T’s corporate line is vague, stating that it expects “U-verse services to become a multi-billion-dollar revenue opportunity over the next few years,” a phrase Kurath repeated almost word-for-word last night.

Certainly, the service appears to work well. Kurath noted that J.D. Power had accorded it the highest customer satisfaction levels for video service in those regions where it was available, and it has already received a number of awards – including 2009 Consumer Communications Service Product of the Year from Frost & Sullivan.

The comparison between BSkyB tomorrow and AT&T today is a little invidious, perhaps. AT&T enjoys late-mover advantage, allowing it to benefit from the latest technologies. BSkyB is much more constrained in what it is able to achieve given that it needs to address a legacy platform dating back to 1998, and not only a less mature broadband and networked home environment, but a less advanced HDTV one, too.

Another key difference, arguably, is that BSkyB is a dominant pay-TV operator. AT&T is not, competing against established digital satellite players in the form of DirecTV and Dish Network on the one hand and cable incumbents such as Comcast on the other. So as challenger AT&T needs state-of-the-art feature-sets such as those offered by the U-verse Total Home DVR to differentiate itself from the competition.

BSkyB can afford to be a little more relaxed, perhaps: neither Virgin Media’s cable platform nor BT Vision are about to offer such a rich multi-room feature-set any time soon.

(Declaration of interest: Microsoft Mediaroom sponsors the Connected TV blog)

IPTV World Forum: ANT Software demos Amazon TV shopping through STB IP port

Posted by Barry Flynn on March 25, 2009 3 comments

Over a decade ago, I remember reviewing the interactive shopping service BSkyB offered its subscribers when it launched what was then called its Open… service. The Sky box had (and still does) an analogue dial-up modem which, when I wanted to try browsing the Somerfield supermarket shelves, spent a good 15 minutes connecting and (apparently) attempting to download the entire product range via the phone-line. I was underwhelmed.

I recalled this experience when I visited ANT Software’s stand at the IPTV Forum today and saw a demonstration of an interactive TV application which allowed the user to buy a DVD or a book from Amazon related to the channel or programme being viewed. The contrast, a decade on, was staggering – and provided a convincing example of at least one way the Ethernet port now being added to many broadcast digital TV set-top boxes could eventually be monetised.

ANT’s application – in this particular emulation – works like this. First, the user has to link his or her Amazon account to the service, and assign a PIN to the TV application. The Amazon application subsequently signals to the user when it is available for a particular channel or programme, and – when the action is paused – an Amazon-branded window is automatically called up showing a range of books or DVDs related to that content. These can then be purchased by navigating to the relevant title and entering a PIN at the point of sale. Amazon’s back-office then does the rest, and the title is delivered to the user’s home in the normal way.

In the example I was shown, the Nascar racing channel was the one being streamed and then paused, so Nascar-related books and DVDs were displayed. Richard Baker, ANT’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, who demonstrated the concept to me, noted that the application could in principle be tied to any piece of EPG meta-data associated with the content being viewed: for instance, if watching a movie where the meta-data contained the actors’ names, the Amazon window might show relevant biographical titles or DVDs they had starred in.

Baker also noted that the ‘pause’ trigger was just one idea. Pressing ‘info’ or perhaps the red button on a remote control could be used instead.

The Amazon application – believed to be the first time the online book-store has been linked to TV in this way – is just one of a suite of multimedia services supported by the latest version of ANT’s Galio Suite under its new ‘IP Active’ banner. The idea is to enable new services on the IP port which extend and go beyond the TV environment. The platform uses familiar W3C standards-based Javascript, HTML and CSS elements and open media APIs, and allows access to a wide variety of applications including an online photo album (which allows users to view and interact with photos uploaded to a site such as Flickr or Snapfish), and online games (such as those aggregated by Accedo Broadband).

A number of things are significant about ANT’s approach. First, the broadband link’s speed is being exploited to offer more than just over-the-top video – one of the major applications being touted for the IP port at this year’s Forum event. Second, while retaining Amazon’s distinctive branding, this is clearly a TV-tailored version of the online book-store, which respects the constraints of a window within the TV display. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the call-to-action is contextual.

One of the major misconceptions behind Open… was the assumption that allowing impulse purchases via the TV screen was a killer app in itself. This was largely based on a misinterpretation of the success of impulse pay-per-view into the US cable market, where buy-rates shot up as soon as it became possible to purchase movies through the remote control instead of ordering them over the phone. What was forgotten (or ignored) was that a pay-per-view purchase is necessarily contextual: the consumer is buying video through a device which is optimised for … displaying and promoting video. That does not (necessarily) apply to non-video-related products.

Those lessons were learnt by Sky some time ago – but the technology, in terms of the power of the set-top box, learnings about the design of user interfaces, and the speed of Internet connections, has taken a decade to catch up.

ANT is by no means the only company exploiting this fact – but it was encouraging to see an interactive TV shopping application that, for once, looked as if it meant business.

(NB in the initial version of this post, I inadvertently promoted Richard Baker to CEO. ANT’s CEO is, of course, Simon Woodward. Apologies)

Informa: IPTV nudges 20m global homes as fibre approaches 50m

Posted by Barry Flynn on March 19, 2009 No comments

Ahead of next week’s IPTV World Forum in London, organizer Informa Telecoms & Media has announced the results of its latest research into broadband and multi-channel TV subscription numbers, headlining the fact that FTTx (fibre) subscriptions are approaching 50m, with IPTV nudging 20m.

According to research Informa will conclude this month, global fixed broadband subscriptions stood at 422 million at the end of 2008, adding nearly 68 million subscriptions in the year and 16 million in the final quarter.

The biggest access technology remains DSL (65% of the total), but FTTx (11%) registered its biggest in year gain to date, adding over 11 million subscriptions – almost exactly the same number as cable broadband (21%).

The growth of FTTx is in part explained by robust growth in Asia-Pacific, says Informa: the region added 20% more subscriptions in 2008 than in 2007. In addition, nine of the world’s 10 largest FTTx operators are in the region.

Western Europe, meanwhile, has seen broadband growth stagnate, as all but five of its 30 countries now exceed a household penetration level of 50% and 20 countries enjoy penetration of over 60%.China, where broadband subscriptions grew by 21% over 2008 to reach 82 million subscriptions, passed the USA mid-year to become the world’s largest fixed broadband market, though it still has a household penetration level of below 20%.

Significantly, of the four main multichannel TV platforms, IPTV and digital terrestrial (DTT) are increasing their share of the market and now hold 10% and 3 30% of the global market, respectively.

The research, based on a continuous programme of research covering 730 fixed broadband (xDSL, cable broadband, FTTx, LAN, satellite and fixed wireless) operators in 160 countries and nearly 100 IPTV operators in 50 countries, will be presented in an opening address at the IPTV World Forum at Olympia, London, next week.

Farncombe Technology, which hosts this blog, will be conducting an IPTV Masterclass on IPTV Deployment in association with the Forum.