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Author: Mark Main, Jonathan Coham
The IEC's annual European Broadband World Forum concluded on Thursday in Paris. Four days of Keynote presentations, Plenary sessions, workshops and in-depth speaker panels plus a vibrant and varied exhibition hall gave delegates more than enough to select from. We were able to sample a good mix of each and spent a good amount of our time talking to as many solution providers and their customers as we could fit in.
We didn't see earth-shattering announcements, but it was clear that the concept of the fully networked home - distributing content and making services accessible around the home - is becoming a key issue, particularly for those telcos with growing numbers of IPTV customers. Many technology and business numerous issues yet to be resolved, and Ovum's new Connected Home service - being launched next month - will be addressing many of these themes over the coming months.
Interesting issues included fibre in the access network: the 'open access' model is starting to finding favour, but the issue of how certain types of fibre deployment of players with SMP could be unbundled is still unresolved. In other debates, there was plenty of reference to content delivery via both telco IPTV and Internet video - all prefaced of course in the context of the recent Google/YouTube announcement.
Content owners want to move to a slice-and-dice 'licensing to the individual, for life' model that will surely meet a brick wall when it comes to many of those already active engaged in content sharing. In addition to the difficulty and relative unwillingness of many of today's service providers to address the 'long tail' of content (as we've noted before), the middle segment (which needs a name!) also came in for critical assessment: how do small and mid-size independents producers bring their offerings to market in the on-demand arena?
IPTV players were urged to keep offerings simple and compelling; and to work progressively, rather than expecting rapid success. We think such caution and prudence is probably correct from an operator business perspective, but may frustrate the smaller-scale content producers who will need to seek alternative channels to market.
Overall, we found an objective view of IPTV and its merits. Although IPTV largely presents an opportunity for revenue generation, we remain unconvinced that some advanced features really are as value-added as they are represented, in the same way that spam filtering, anti-virus and content access control never really generated much additional revenue for ISPs. In the 'simplicity model' for IPTV, these features should be included as ordinary service enhancements - when the time is right.
Understandably there was more than occasional reference to "Web 2.0", not to mention "Telco 2.0" and even "VoIP 2.0". Frankly, much of the "2.0" label simply describes a growing level of maturity in various markets and that, in truth, there really hasn't really been any quantum leap or change in thinking or activity.
Interestingly, there was a clear theme of increased consumer and service orientation among major equipment vendors. We saw examples of two major equipment vendors where consumer research featured clearly in product strategy, fitting conveniently with an obvious shift to managing the end-to-end deployment of services and infrastructure. This places such vendors even more aggressively into the IT services space. A future clash of businesses? You bet!
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