Graham Craddock, general manager of Tandberg Television Asia-Pacific, discusses the future of IPTV
Show Daily: Interactivity is the next phase for IPTV - what's the trick to balancing the need for interactivity with the need to keep the UI as simple as possible‾
Graham Craddock: The difficulty in the past has always been that there was so much encouragement to do it all in-house - develop your own technology in order to build the product. That might have been on some kind of basic platform related to the middleware in your set-top box, so the typical middleware providers would have given some kind of API or access to the box, and then you would build some software in your engineering labs that then enables you to take advantage of that, which would give some kind of interactive experience to the viewer. But then of course that's got a lead time, you've got production costs and support costs on the engineering side. That's not the way we would encourage things to go in the future. The tools to create this, like how you build the screens, how the product enfolds in terms of the user experience, are there to allow you to do that so that it looks and acts the way you want, so you don't have to redesign the whole architecture from the ground up.
These things also tend to be time-sensitive, so if you want to hit a particular event, then you absolutely have to have that interactive application ready in time. You need the ability to have the right tools that don't need internal support. Outsourcing builders for this kind of thing is happening now. We offer services to build these applications as well.
The other aspect is the open nature of this - if you have an open set of tools, then you're not tied to what's in the set-top box. The sets of tools that we have are open in the sense that we haven't fixed our own solution inside an STB, whereas historically, if it was an open TV platform with middleware in the box, you'd develop the application at the headend, which basically reduced the ability to transfer that application between platform, and then the value of that application is reduced. That also means that if a developer makes an application and then goes to another service provider, he would have to learn a completely new kind of platform.
How much interest are you seeing in sharing applications for IPTV, like user-generated content communities or P2P‾
Well, we're seeing some examples of that. One that our CEO likes to talk about a lot is 'Dating On Demand', where people go into a kiosk in a mall or someplace, make their pitch, and it gets put onto the VOD server. Apparently a new party type of thing has occurred where you get your mates over to your house, bring some beers, and watch these videos.
I think that speaks to the importance of experimentation and investment. People have got to go into this, especially the IPTV people, with the expectation of needing to invest in services that are new, fresh and innovative, and yet knowing that not everything is going to work. So you have to expect failure.
How is mobile TV going to play into all of this for telcos that have broadband and cellular arms and want to integrate them as PCCW has done‾