“The killer app for television really is television”
Raymond Snoddy returns from this morning’s ‘The internet comes to TV’ seminar and says “more television and video on ever more devices has got to be a good thing. Hasn’t it?”
Sean Besser, business development vice president of ROVI, put it well at MediaTel Group’s “The internet comes to TV” seminar this morning (Wed.)
“The killer app for television is television,” declared Besser. Of course it is, and although it such an obvious truism, not everyone manages to get obvious truisms.
But the questions remain. What sort of television, on what sort of devices, and who is going to pay?
At the same breakfast there were also some almost wistful bon mots from another panellist, William Cooper, owner of informitv.
“I am a true believer in convergence and have been for 20 years,” declared Cooper. While the former head of interactive at BBC Broadcast is to be congratulated for his patience and doggedness, in general it is wise to cross to the other side of the street when faced by true believers of any kind.
The thoughts of Besser and Cooper took on an added significance because they coincided with the launch of SeeSaw – a joey that somehow survived the Kangaroo train crash.
SeeSaw is using technology bought by Arqiva, the broadcast transmission company, after the competition authorities derailed Project Kangaroo.
The latest aggregator of online content is offering more than 3,000 hours of archive and “recent” programmes from Channel 4, Five and BBC Worldwide. A further 2,000 hours will be added by June and there will then be charging for some programmes.
Initial reaction was mixed. One comment, surely laced with heavy sarcasm, exalted in the fact that there would now be “finally a chance to review the glory years of Eurotrash“.
There are a lot of very optimistic video-on-demand operators out there, even though the signs of success are hard to detect.
There are some really big, juicy – and rather meaningless – numbers out there as well.
How about this from Intel? “By 2015 more than 12 billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content.”
And just in case you didn’t grasp the full import, that means more than one device for “every man and woman on the planet.” Or cut another way, if the 500 billion hours were equally apportioned that would be more than 31 hours of unique TV and video for every man and women on the planet, although a lot of it might have to be in Hindi and Mandarin.
There are obvious problems with trying to distill business opportunities from such gargantuan statistics.
The process does throw up a few uncomfortable thoughts. There undoubtedly is a market in delivering free-to-air archive programmes such as Eurotrash and old episodes of Dr Who online. The danger is that it might be quite a small market – and one that is already rather well serviced by thematic satellite channels.
Screen Digest, for example, estimates that online revenues in the UK from free-to-view programmes will reach £180 million by 2013. A significant sum indeed, except what if the cost of raising such revenues – ahem – should turn out to be considerably larger than £180 million?
It is also true, at least so far in the UK, that the vast majority of VOD viewing is actually time-shift viewing of recently broadcast mainstream television. In December BBC iPlayer requests topped 100 million for the first time.
Most people given the choice would rather watch live television on beautiful, large, flat HD sets rather than on computer screens.
Here, as in so many other things, the Swedes are singular. Forty eight per cent of Swedish respondents to a recent Motorola study said they would rather watch live/streaming internet video than live TV.
This may be more of a comment on the quality of live Swedish TV than anything else.
But something at last to cheer up William Cooper. Convergence is finally speeding up. By this summer new television sets will be on the market which can take live material from the internet and broadcast it seamlessly alongside normal broadcast television.
If you don’t fancy buying a new TV just yet then there is Project Canvas, which has already received preliminary approval from the BBC Trust.
The official line repeated again this morning is that Canvas could still be available by late 2010. Well I suppose it could. But 2011 seems a much more likely bet particularly when you consider what the competition authorities could yet do to the project. They seem to have a pathological hatred of British broadcasters trying to create new markets for content.
On the whole they prefer this sort of thing to be left to unregulated types like Google, Yahoo or Hulu.
But good luck and Happy Christmas to Canvas, SeeSaw, Hulu, Blinkbox and all the rest. After all, more television and video on ever more devices has got to be a good thing, hasn’t it?
And the killer app for television really is television, whether fully converged or not.