From madan@inomy.com Tue Jun 26 16:26:25 2001
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 03:35:08 +0500
From: Madanmohan Rao 
Reply-To: gkd@phoenix.edc.org
To: gkd@phoenix.edc.org
Subject: [GKD] Convergence between WWW and TV

An article I wrote on the recent TV/Web Convergence Summit
has been published this week:
http://www.economictimes.com/today/31netw03.htm
http://www.electronicmarkets.org/ (under the EM Wire section)
     Happy reading,

- madan

Madanmohan Rao
Editor, INOMY.com; Columnist, The Economic Times
Bangalore, INDIA

-------


The Economic Times Online
www.economictimes.com

If you can^Òt bill it, kill it: development mantra

Madanmohan Rao

WHILE the dotcom backlash is taking a heavy toll on the B2C front, numerous
start-ups are focusing now on another set of fronts on the convergent
infrastructure side: the convergence between the Internet and telephony
(dot-telecoms), the Internet and wireless communication (m-dotcoms), and
the broadband internet and television (broad-coms).

Over 240 delegates from 30 countries representing 200 companies gathered in
Amsterdam recently for the third annual convergence conference titled
^ÓWhere TV Meets The Web^Ô ( www.tvmeetstheweb.com ).

^ÓTV content on the Web has come a long way since the early days of online
Webcams and the TV clip of the Pathfinder landing on Mars in the
mid-1990s,^Ô observed Monique van Dusseldorp, CEO of pan-European research
firm Van Dusseldorp and Partners, which hosted the conference.

E-commerce is now being integrated with television commerce or t-commerce
as we enter a new ICE age (with converged information, communication and
entertainment sectors).

In addition to a good data pipe, key requisites for convergent ventures to
succeed include compelling content, interactive services, and
person-to-person (P2P) connectivity.

^ÓBut it is very difficult to gauge what consumers may want or reject. At
the same time, many entertainment companies are terrified of getting
Napsterised,^Ô said van Dusseldorp.

^ÓWe are also seeing a huge flux in business plans,^Ô she observed, as media
players struggle to find out what works and when.

Interactivity to TV via two-way set-top boxes is being offered by some
operators by integrating online chat and SMS messaging with TV programming;
it works particularly well for offerings like educational content (tutor
interaction), gameshows (vote-along), sports (statistics, choosing
different camera angles), finance (homebanking) and information inquiries
(yellow pages).

^ÓThere is now a new interpretation for B2C: back to cash,^Ô said Brett
Savill, director of financial advisory services at Pricewater-house Coopers
in London.

^ÓWe have evolved a new rule for development initiatives: if you can^Òt bill
it, kill it,^Ô said Rafael Bonnelly, VP of content at Terra Networks, the
internet wing of Spanish telecom Telefonica which acquired the Lycos portal.

Telefonica is focusing not just on B2C Web and WAP portals, but also the
B2B market via new media consultancy and Internet data centre services,
said Silvia Rico, investment manager at Telefonica Media in Spain.

At the device level, a strong iTV player is US-based Tivo ( www.tivo.com),
which offers set-top caches which store upto 60 hours of TV content so that
users can watch programs whenever they want and also pause, rewind and
replay movies in slow motion.

The company has also forged a strategic partnership with AOL Time Warner
which is expected to extend service and marketing capabilities along the
Internet front.

Other European media conglomerates aggressively moving into broadband
Internet and iTV include the UK^Òs Pearson Publishing and The Economist.

^ÓWe are moving from a content to an ASP model of broadband delivery for
areas like e-learning,^Ô said Keric Morris, director of strategy at Pearson
Broad-band Education Television in London; over 80 per cent of Pearson
Publishing^Òs textbooks are now online, with a Web companion.

The Economist magazine is extending its strong print brand to the Net via a
Web site ( www.economist.com) and a TV site (www.economist.tv), according
to Tony Wales, director of Economist TV. The company has formed alliances
for airline inflight programmes and regular TV content.

In addition to the TV and print players, innovative entry appro-aches to
consumer homes are being launched by mobile communications companies like
Nokia.

^ÓThere is a huge opportunity in integrating mobile communication needs into
the home environment,^Ô said Richard Nelger, head of home product management
at Nokia in Finland.

^ÓThere is a real hunger out there for IP,^Ô said Jonas Birgersson, CEO of
Framfab Labs in Stockholm. But this will converge to the content level, and
not just to the access device level like cable modems. IP television sets
will soon open up a whole world of programming to viewers, Birgersson
predicted.

A leading internet player in streaming content is Real Networks, whose Real
Player plug-in crossed the 200 million user mark in April 2001, with 40
million in Europe alone.

^ÓThe economics of the Internet are real and profound, despite popular
sentiment. But making money online is more difficult than expected. People
will pay only for compelling content,^Ô said Joanna Shields, VP at Real
Networks for Europe.

For `middleware^Ò developers, huge opportunities are opening up in content
development and syndication, user authentication, customer profile
management, billing systems, set-top applications, ad server systems,
multi-channel content management platforms, data centres, and systems
integration.

^ÓThe key to interactive broadband content like iTV lies with third party
developers,^Ô said Peter Larson, head of content services at Liberate
Technologies, which recently announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems
to extend Java technology to its set-top boxes.

At the packaging level, XML platforms can help content providers structure
their offerings simultaneously for Web, TV and mobile channels. ^ÓAll our
news stories are created with headlines and summaries, and are packaged and
tagged in XML in three different formats and speeds for the Web, PDAs and
digital TV,^Ô said Barak Matzkevich from the online video business
development unit at Reuters.

At the artistic end of the spectrum, one solution to keeping consistent
^Óbrand carriers^Ô across multiple channels is via animated icons called
avatars, said Stefan Kloos, managing director of I-Dmedia in Berlin.

Another emerging sector of players on the Internet front is in digital
content delivery, by caching content closer to the `edge^Ò of the network
whereby interaction latency times can be reduced.

As more and more information and entertainment content moves to Internet
formats, security and digital access management will become paramount, and
metadata will be increasingly merged with data itself.

^ÓMPEG-4 has been chosen as the standard of choice for IP content over next
generation 3G mobile networks, and ensures vendor interoperability as well
as a digital rights management interfaces,^Ô said Ahmad Ouri, general
manager of Philips^Ò MP4Net division in California.

While much of this Internet-TV convergence has vast implications for the
entertainment and education industry, it has also caught the eye of
numerous governments and policymakers around the world, who have launched
broadband initiatives in partnership with the private sector to gear up
their citizens for the coming multimedia explosion.

^ÓPublic initiatives on the broadband front should supplement the business
models of industry. Benefits of city-based initiatives should percolate to
the rest of the country as well,^Ô advised Philip Weinberg, a McKinsey
consultant in London. -

© The Economic Times Online. All rights reserved.




------------
***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership***
To post a message, send it to: 
To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to:
. In the 1st line of the message type:
subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd
Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at:
<http://www.globalknowledge.org>