This topic (and my favourite) has been raised in the past couple of years and many times by me in my blog.  Many articles in the press today are all assuming that the Linear TV model is on its way out.  As we have read and those who follow TV realise that in fact in most broadcasters have it squarely rooted in their business model, even in this new OTT world.  This is the way TV manages to entertain us on a daily basis.  The TV Programme Line-Up is decided by people whose job it is to fill the bandwidth.   A-la-carte is not actually “mainstream” it is growing in popularity whilst thier is the new pioneering wild-west of today’s TV landscape.  However OTT is so restricted to geo-locking or placed behind restricted PayTV Services:  (e.g. AppleTV can only be bought in the local iTunes store, in the local language,  if your country has one) So you can only get some things that you want depending on the country you are in or the amount the family allocates to PayTV Subscription models… Most people can only afford to buy so much entertainment in a month.  Music was not bought on a daily basis…a lot of people bought the new single/Albums on a monthly basis or when a new release came out, and still do; or they received them as gifts – Xmas is coming.  Music is decidedly different from video because the ROI is massive – You buy it and listen and listen and listen again and again and again….Video is not consumed in anyway the same manner.  The value proposition is different.  Promotion is the word used in the music industry – Bands were promoted by Individuals or the Bands themselves and gigs/concerts are even promoted at my local supermarket (Ticket-Corner) and they became recognised or faded away (yes their selection mostly given to us by some canny A&R person or given Air-Play by DJs and so on (Recommendation)…That has always been Social Media.  It was called Marketing in the past…making a market.

Video/TV/Film is promoted by Hollywood (normally on the Radio and TV), also recommended by friends (always has been)…The Cinema or Movie Theatre was the promotion of Film too – TV has “film nights” and promotes film releases – “Coming Soon” – This is all Social Media – Facebook Recommendation et al are actually OK, but ONLY if you take heed of what your family and friends think and you agree … my son recommends films to me all the time and I never dare watch them…Made that mistake too many times, my brother too – their likes are nowhere near mine!  So whose  recommendation is actually  worth anything – the person that gives it or the person that receives it…the expert or the novice?  I worked in the music industry and it was as subjective as art and video/film is no different.

The Website recommendation – “If you like this you will also like this” is complete nonsense and very robotic based on what?…Comparing like-for-like isn’t in my opinion a clever recommendation it is a bit boring isn’t it – Amazon makes this part of their website and they offer the same or similar books If you like this book on Woodworking you will also like this book on Woodworking…Like Video Books are about Variety not like for like….The same thing all the time is not entertaining – Variety is entertainment.  Music Compilations were about variety…Television is about variety and it is all getting stale as we are no longer seeing variety but repetition of genre and the same old same old formats.  Cooking, DIY, Reality and Make-Over shows – Yawn!  Music is fun and engaging and when I am in the car I hear things that I have never heard and its uplifting but remember its a format that is 3-4 minutes of your time not 30-40.  Music and Video are not sisters but distant relatives…

Sorry Netflix and Newteevee…but it follows my earlier post…http://newteevee.com/2010/10/21/netflix-goes-down-apocalypse-ensues/

In response to: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/19/the-future-of-television-the-digital-living-room/  (Best If You Read it Too, first)

I hear what you say but have you actually thought about the real people in the street and how a population is catered for, not the technologists, or the likes of you or I and all those who wait for experts to reveal their thoughts, or spend hours writing their thoughts…real people the majority who have a life, a job, not as much disposable income as you might think. I will select a country outside of the USA – France…an Internet savvy country who has a traditional Broadcast TV and also a long standing PayTV sector. They have a strong technology market but all in all people have 1 TV screen in the home, maybe 2…I am talking about the masses here. Satellite (Canal+ and TPS) battled it out for rights to Football and Rugby etc. and sold PayTV packages to make money. It costs a lot for the average household and is deemed expensive, as is Sky in the UK. France then went more digital and launched DTT (Digital terrestrial) Standard Definition they went from 4 channels to 30…Content degraded rapidly (filler just like a Music CD)l. They piggybacked the Canal+ onto that DTT offer with Conditional Access…it’s fairly unsuccessful. People still watch the 4 main channels but now a little clearer with better sound…after reaching about 3million homes they decided to go HD and a new receiver hit the market…at a re-jigged higher price than the SD Boxes which by this time had dropped to 30€…so mainstream France kept buying at 30€ not at 250€ for the new box…Content in HD did not do it. Strategy failure numero uno!

Prior or alongside the DTT rollout IPTV popped up and the Telcos went after our bucks with the 29.90€ flat fee as of today for Broadband, VOIP Telephone and TV. The infrastructure breaks down a lot! The metropolitan areas are better covered but it still goes out the rural areas poorly served. Routers breakdown, lines get cut by accident and all in the entire infrastructure is, when all said and done, weak. With the www savvy French piracy became a huge issue and they had to make a law (3 strikes and you are out) the letters are already in the hands of the biggest culprits. Back to the infrastructure. Call centres are run out of Tunisia and its forever and a day to get through the press 1 for this and 2 for that to end up with a miserable call centre clerk who hates their job (and you are charged whilst on the call) … for an engineer to come out forget it and if it’s a busy period you wait and wait and wait. I have seen cases where people have been cut off from the Internet for weeks at a time. There is always a Satellite signal, there is always a Terrestrial signal and it’s tried, tested and trusted it will not go away for some time to come that we all agree on.

Meanwhile Broadband speeds have increased no doubt. So AppleTV and Connected TV and Boxee and Netflix etc. (and French equivalents) popped up to exploit that. Here they piggyback an infrastructure that is already offering a mediocre service in terms of QoS and delivery of bits and bytes and the content on the incumbent ISPs IPTV systems is not too hot. The Orange IPTV interface is clunky and slow which all drives people to moan and look for some alternative…Why not GoogleTV or AppleTV and all the content you want when you want…and yes it exists but there it all falls apart: Price of the products, more cost to the consumer for additional packages, same old slow connectivity and more cost as it is not free content that is on offer but PayTV in another form on top of the subscription that you pay for the TV anyway (including Govt. License Fee per annum on top of any PayTV package). TV Business Models are relying on a 30€ receiver to view some stuff or a subscription package and receiver rental so will the Internet!

So what content does the average French person want? What does the average any person in the world want…well we don’t know, nor do they the most part of the time. Programme line-ups were put together for people to follow something that a person thought might make compelling viewing and created in such a way for Broadcasters to have eyeballs glued to the TV to sell advertising to buy/make more programmes etc. So now over the Internet we make a shitload of content available from anywhere in the world and people can access it, no have to find it…So we invent Search engines and now recommendation engines…to do what? Search for something that you have seen already… because if you have seen it you know about it and you have a search string in your head…and then the question is raised why do you want to watch something that you have already seen? And if you go generic like “Dora the Explorer” how do you know that you have not already seen it. It’s not the music industry, its visual and we consume differently. It’s often a last resort thing to watch a repeated show/film on TV. A hard drive full of same genre or similar genre content is very boring I can tell you.

GUI and claiming the Remote Control with which GUI do I get to where I want: The Broadcasters or GoogleTV’s GUI or Boxees GUI; how many GUIs will we have on a screen in a home?) Then when we do get into the mood and start to seek instead of being fed TV… “If you like this you might like this too” is the catch phrase of new TV and suddenly you are bombarded with like for like programming offering little variety. The Amazon example is “people who bought this book also bought these” – No they didn’t they bought one out of the same genre, the one they thought was the best for them. Like the music Industry it’s about the singer, books about the author, films about the actor granted so we can have one type of search that bears fruit. Variety is the mainstay of French TV – Music, Cabaret, Stand Up Comics, their own CSI called CIS of course. Their own Gendarmerie stories and a whole host of chat shows where all the guests have a book or film or DVD to promote…They also like French movies and they make damn good films. Hollywood re-makes most of them into bastardized American equivalents some with great success. The French masses are quite regular folk, people who have only so much viewing time and they are very well catered for in the market. There is no “problem to fix” just a technology trying to become something it is not supposed to be and that is another delivery mechanism for the same old stuff we can already get.

You are right saying that the Telco’s stepped outside of what they are good at and they bleed cash today… they are going back, especially in Europe and the tide is slowly turning…but they have to do it gently, gently. They are going back to trying to monetize the pipes. So where is this leading you ask…well they have decided to clamp down on freeloaders (pirates). They have started to stop “all you can eat” data downloading as the masses got into iPhones saturating the infrastructure. Pay as you go is coming back. As video consumption increases the pipes have a problem and we are only at the beginning of this effect of saturation. So new bundles are being offered and the whole business model of TV is in question. Meanwhile the DTT still sends boring, banal shows to boring, banal minds who are exhausted after a long hard day in the factory or in a truck on the road….and it is consumed. My own daughter has now stopped being an active consumer over the Internet to a passive in front of the Broadcaster because after a hard day teaching at school she is now ready to be fed TV and the PVR is a nice place to fill the gaps between shows you don’t want to see… Yes we trundle on in the TV world inventing a new “paradigm” but in this windy discourse I have highlighted, a small part of the whole problem. Each country has different rules, different languages, GEO-LOCKING has not even been mentioned so we see that that TV was created for the “masses” in each country and even with the advent of the Open Internet or World Wide Web we see that businesses still need to box cleverly, close doors and protect their businesses in order to sustain revenue in order to have infrastructure for TV programmes to ride upon. That model needs looking at more deeply to see whether we are just creating an OTT Internet Bubble that will Burst just like Internet of yore…Nobody has actually asked this because its considered stuffy, not inventive or innovative, however – Perhaps the Internet is great for Multimedia (Text, graphics and short videos a la YouTube and functions OK just the way it is and that the coming of streaming TV will swallow up the bits and bytes and make “regular use of the Internet” a slow painful experience once again…Now wouldn’t that be amusing… Darling “Whats on TV Tonight” – “Nothing the Internet is down again Honey”.

So recommendation engines will offer you stuff to watch based on your viewing habits…how boring! What about surprise, variety and getting something interesting that someone else thought about and produced thinking people might enjoy it.

What happens if you watch a CSI miami and suddenly you are recommended the CSI New York and CSI Paris and CSI Bolton etc. You are inundated with Police genre…Or Broke Back Mountain gets you a recommendation for all things related and you are not interested. How many times must you watch a genre before the software decides you only want to watch that for the rest of your life. You nor any other human is really in control of your TV Content…a piece of software is? Arggghhhh where are we headed?

the DVB Commercial module has approved the Commercial Requirements for OTT services under MHP. Ironically a version is already shipping in the market. Standards work is playing catch Up…

I have just gone through a private experiment with TV Content gathering.   My Satellites had to be removed for 6 weeks due to building work and that of course has turned into 12 weeks and still counting so I needed to amass a hard drive of Content to weather the storm.  During this time I found an interesting flaw in PVR Recording also TV Reccomendation Software.  Television is several things and boring  is not supposed to be one of them…well so I thought.  However I have a hard drive full of the same, same, same, samey stuff….In order to gather a whole plethora of Content I had to pre-empt a few shows and ask to record them and had the PVR (Satellite) series record some of my favourite TV episodes (of the moment) with another system (IPTV) that would after understanding my viewing habits reccomend shows I might like to watch and recorded them for me in some instances.  Hells! Bells! – I now have repeat “genres” backing up my hard disk.  For goodness sake!  How many “CSI like”, Cooking, DIY shows and ” House Like” episodes can one watch in a lifetime….Even if I also get some foreign language variety… VARIETY is why I and my family watch TV.  Saturday night was all about that in the past;  Variety Shows and Surprise and Dissappointment also.   Today the industry of HYPE thinks that just because I like CSI Miami that I will like CSI Vegas and CSI New York and and CIS Paris or the French equivalent (No its not a TYPO they allways swap the Acronyms around here).   Recommend me something I have never seen and that may surprise me – Is that possible?  Or is that called random viewing, channel zapping?…I don’t know anymore!

Fundamentally there is something random about other people deciding the Channel line-up that I actually LIKE!  Its the surprise element and in some cases Channel Line-Up regularity that marks a moment in family life.  I cannot for example or rarely can watch the 8pm French news as I am helping to put the kids to bed, reading a story or preparing our evening meal when we at last have tranquility at home.  Catch-Up would help but that needs the Satellite Dish connected.  Actually if we don’t find anything entertaining we, yes my Wife and I, will look quickly at the other options on the other channels or perhaps not watch anything at all if nothing pleases us both.  It is not IMPERATIVE that we actually watch something but Hypsters seem to imagine that we fill 24/7 with TV and one of the reasons why we need 3 screens technology.

What we do not want is to spend any time at all “Googling” for something we know about or have seen already…  So Catch-Up TV makes sense but that is nothing new.  When I had UK’s Sky (before I got cut off for being overseas) hey had it and called it +1 hour or something of that ilk and it was useful.  LinearTV Catch-Up has its place.  Searching and Recommendation is a whole lot of hullabaloo.   There will be ALWAYS be something totally random on another Channel that was chosen because it was thought to be entertaining programming by some smart TV Producer and Channel Line-Up Manager.

My hard drive is now FULL and it consists of over 30 episodes of CSI of varying flavours, 20 episodes of House and 2 or 3 old movies and one that I have not seen which is in Black and White.  I missed it first time around due to not having been allowed to watch TV after 8pm until the age of 12.  Imagine our modern day dilemma and suffrance having to watch the same Genre of programme over and over and over again.  It is mind numbingly boring.  Anymore CSI Miami and Horatios “carrot top tilt forward, cock head to the right line delivery will have me copying him in the office!   What of IPTV I hear you shout.   Well it is Orange France and full of CIS, Ange Guardian and other fluffy stuff that is not very intellectually stimulating – The films are very French and you can only Downlad and Play not actually store anything if it is over a certain size.  The interface is horrendous which has the wife asking me why I haven’t sold our sexy stuff into France Telecom and that takes on a whole new direction to the evenings entertainment.  The conclusion is that if TV wants to be successful in its present format VARIETY IS STILL THE SPICE OF LIFE and it should be present without making me and my family work hard to be the Channel Line-Up Manager.  You “Hypsters” might love that but most of my family and a great deal of my friends don’t actually watch what they have already seen neither do they crave several doses of CSI Miami every night.  TV is NOT Music.