Andrew FrankThe race to claim the future of television continued to play out at the National Association of Broadcasters annual event in Las Vegas.
This year much of the focus moved upstream, away from last-mile issues and toward services for content providers looking to simplify management multiplatform distribution, as many vendors focused on cloud service solutions for video-specific point problems like transcoding, large-file transfer, and metadata management and extraction. (A key exception on the last-mile front was mobile TV, but that’s a story for another post.)
At the same time, many vendors, some new and some well-known, were also attacking much bigger problems, like offering comprehensive multiplatform video management, rethinking the way video advertising works, and redefining what TV might mean to consumers. As suggested in a recent research note (Two Roads to TV 2.0, subscription required), the Internet (bitheads) and TV industry (tubeheads) have differing visions for how things should play out.
Of course it’s an oversimplification to group competitors into those who assume the Internet is the prevailing model for the future of video distribution and user experience, while traditional TV is going the way of the dinosaur (bitheads) vs. those who assume that television is and always will be a fundamentally different animal than the Internet, in experience, technology, and economics (tubeheads). Nonetheless, it was surprising how frequently these positions were articulated in briefings at NAB.
The credo of bitheads, as we all know, is “bits are bits.” In other words, it doesn’t matter what the bits represent, once something’s been digitized, it can be stored and transferred using the common protocols and infrastructure of the global Internet. In this way of thinking, there are virtually no problems that can’t be solved with some combination of ingenious software and more IP bandwidth. Cisco is one company that articulates this view pretty clearly.
The credo of tubeheads, in contrast, is “video is different.” Video has real-time qualities that can’t be fully addressed by thinking of it as just another packet stream. In this way of thinking, the challenges of video are best met with specialized hardware and more-sophisticated network management techniques. 3D is a major focus of this group. Harris and Tandberg TV were among the vendors showing impressive video-centric technology solutions at NAB.
One area on which both sides currently agree is that the key video battleground today is at the edge of cloud: the cable headends and telco COs just before the last mile, where CDNs have planted caching servers. Now companies like Move Networks and ZillionTV are racing to stake out rack space in this increasingly high-value real estate. Watch this space.
Another interesting observation from NAB about bitheads and tubeheads is, with few exceptions, this is not a competition between companies that are generally aligned with one view or the other. Instead, the most interesting conflicts are playing out within companies, where digital groups and traditional groups, running separate profit centers, are competing for resources and increasingly undercutting one another’s businesses. Over and over we heard stories from vendors of the challenges of intra-corporate misalignment at content providers, MSOs, telcos, and ad agencies that was complicating all negotiations. In this environment, alignment and governance that accelerates strategic decision making will be a key competitive advantage for incumbents negotiating disruptive digital transformations.
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: NAB, TV 2.0
