Reflections from IBC - By Marshall Porter
I’ve just returned from a great week at IBC Exhibition and Conference in Amsterdam, September 7-11. We were universally impressed by the event, which not only smashed attendance records (the old record was broken on the morning of the 10th), but also featured the leaders in mobile, IPTV, and content delivery. The traffic through the IPTV and mobile zones was particularly impressive in both quantity and quality.
Reflecting on our time at IBC, a few items really stand out:
1) HD is everywhere! A few years ago, and even last year, HD—and the necessity of supporting it—was questioned: “Do we really need it?” Today, supporting HD is simply a must have—consumers are demanding more and more HD content and, consequently, service providers are planning for HD support in their next upgrade, and specifying HD as a requirement with their vendors.
But this does raise an interesting question: will HD support be a pillar of future profits, or is HD a means to survive. Standard definition head-end equipment itself is quite an investment, but the additional requirement to support HD doubles or triples that up-front investment. As a result, we have a situation where service providers are making significant incremental investments in their systems, but without a commensurate opportunity on the revenue side to match that investment boost.
All this creates a situation that will likely separate successful service providers from those that will not be: those that are to be successful will find innovative ways to boost revenue, turning HD content into a profit center, while those providers that view HD merely as a means to survive may ultimately suffer.
2) DVB-H and DVB-SH After the European endorsement of DVB-H, we fully expected to see noticeably increased momentum in mobile broadcast TV, and that’s precisely what we found. European operators have consistently shifted their mobile TV strategies to focus on DVB-H over alternatives in the market.
A notable exception, there were a surprising number of companies promoting and demonstrating DVB-SH, the venture lead by Alcatel-Lucent, Eutelsat, and SES Astra to provide broadcast mobile services, both streaming and file-based, to Europe. We’re intrigued by the idea, especially given the inconsistent nature of spectrum regulation in Europe. By leveraging satellite technology, service providers will be able to swiftly overcome the national spectrum issues that have thus far held back DVB-H deployments.
3) Mobile data services While DVB-H and MediaFLO garnered the attention for broadcast streaming video services, mobile operators are beginning to plan broadcast data services offerings that will really take advantage of what we believe the best mobile use cases to be – datacasting, clipcasting and push-VOD. More on these mobile use cases in a later entry, but operators are more openly discussing using these push services to drive greater revenue gains, much as Digital Fountain licensee KDDI has done in Japan with services like EZ News Channel
IBC also continued a trend of an increased awareness and push on the part of satellite radio service providers (and automotive OEMs) to use their satellite services to broadcast data to vehicles, whether navigation updates, push-VOD, or other infortainment services. Digital Fountain firmly believes that these services will prove to be a boon to satellite service providers who understand that they can provide much more value that merely streaming audio.
All in all, IBC was an outstanding show! We’re excited about all the new technology, the developments in IPTV and mobile, and we can’t wait until next year’s event.