At this year’s International Broadcasting Convention (IBC2009) in Amsterdam, over 1000 vendors showcased their latest products and services. It was impossible during a visit of a couple of days to take in all the innovations on display in the 12 halls, but the key message is that the TV set is undergoing its biggest transformation since it was invented in the 1920s.
The purpose of the TV set is changing fundamentally. For most of its life, the TV has been a standalone device designed solely for the passive consumption of linear broadcasting. Since the 1980s, this role has slowly been supplemented in most developed markets by the addition of various interactive services, but these have typically been constrained by low-bandwidth return paths. However, since 2005, two things have been driving a TV revolution: the majority of households in developed economies now have broadband, and high-definition TVs (HDTVs) have reached the stage of mass-market adoption.
The combination of broadband and HDTV has led to the rise of the connected TV, which can be used as the device of choice to view a wide variety of content. Increasingly, Internet-delivered content is being combined with traditional broadcast content in various forms, as widgets or overlays or, increasingly, as a source of on-demand content for pay-TV operators that do not have their own high-bandwidth bi-directional network. Within the last year, the satellite operators Canal+ and Viasat have introduced video-on-demand (VoD) services delivered through broadband-enabled set-top boxes. The vendors Pace and NDS both highlighted the rise of what NDS referred to as ‘hybridity’ – the combination of IP with traditional broadcasting technologies – as a key trend.
The TV is not being connected just to the outside world, however – it is increasingly becoming part of the home network. As well as the concept of the ‘whole-home DVR’ (in which content stored on a ‘master’ DVR can be accessed on another TV via any set-top box ‘client’), the proliferation of Digital Living Network Alliance- (DLNA-) certified devices, of which there are now over 6000, is creating an in-home ecosystem in which content residing on one device can be discovered and consumed by any other suitable device connected to the home network. Broadcom is now manufacturing various chips that support home networking using the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) standard for various pay-TV platforms in order to leverage the large installed base of coaxial cable in consumer homes. Many of the other stands we visited at IBC2009 had a home networking demonstration.
The changes in the role of the TV are being reflected in other areas of the video infrastructure value chain. Not only do most middleware vendors provide easy access to Internet or personal content through their user interfaces, but also they are increasingly opening up access to their platforms to enable third parties to create and/or integrate additional applications for a wide range of interactive services, not just to configure them to project their own look and feel. Various approaches are being used to achieve this: Microsoft has created its own community of Mediaroom developers, capitalising on the large numbers of IT experts that are already familiar with its programming languages as used within its other products; others middleware vendors, such as OpenTV, use open standards.
By being connected to the growing amount of digital content inside and outside the home, the TV is positioning itself to remain as the hub of household entertainment for years to come, and is fending off the growing threat from PCs. Indeed, social networking, currently seen as one of the hottest phenomena on the Internet, is now being made use of on the TV to provide content recommendations in the next-generation of ‘intelligent’ electronic programming guides (EPGs). The connected TV enables large amounts of data about usage patterns to be delivered to the pay-TV provider and aggregated with other data so that the provider gets to know its subscribers better. This increases the scope for further monetisation through more-personalised services and advertising (both of which were also hot topics at IBC2009), subject to addressing data protection and privacy concerns.