AssetHouse, the leaders in Digital Proposition Management software for on-demand entertainment service providers, today announced that it has been acquired by IPTV platform leader Amino.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Amino is a global provider of IPTV set-top boxes (STBs), with 1.75 million boxes sold worldwide. It’s AmiNET STB solution is primed for deployment in a wide range of environments such as residential pay-TV, hospitality and healthcare, web TV, education & enterprise and new ‘connected home’ services.

The acquisition will enable Amino to build on existing relationships with telecommunication providers and help to broaden its offering by introducing AssetHouse’s AssetFactory software to backoffice environments of content providers across a range of industries – so that they can better sell, cross-sell and merchandise differentiated content products, promotions, packages and price plans.

In addition to the acquisition, Amino has announced the appointment of Andrew Burke as CEO. Previously, Burke was Chief Executive Officer of BT Entertainment, where he devised and ran the company’s IPTV initiative (BT Vision), pioneered their Digital Media Services and led their relationships with the media world.

The deal will see Amino continue its strategy of innovation, and is underpinned by the growth in the emerging market for online video services, according to Burke: “As the market for IPTV matures, technology is opening the door for telecoms companies to maximise opportunities through better services, targeted content and greater choice.”

“The opportunities here are enormous and are set to change the delivery of rich media to households,” he continued. “This is not only an opportunity for service providers to sell more IPTV, it’ marks the next step in consumer content delivery and distribution. Together, Amino and AssetHouse will close the loop between the set-top box and the merchandising, taking IPTV to the next stage.”

Jonathan Callcut, CEO at AssetHouse commented: “Under the Amino product umbrella we will be able to provide a far richer set of services . Our combined expertise and experience will create an exciting new proposition for content providers of all shapes and sizes, and we’re looking forward to taking it to a market that we already know is waiting for us.”

About Amino Communications

About AssetHouse Technology

Why? Well, because if you want to reach the most possible customers you have to be the most flexible service provider on the block.

A great example of this is BT Vision (an AssetHouse customer), who recently announced that it’ll be extending the reach of its service to X-Box users in order to drive up both network usage and digital product sales.

This is a cracking strategy.

BT Vision ‘gets’ the new world of entertainment on-demand. This new move is a great example of how not to tell your customer how to behave, and how beneficial this can be. Instead, BT is embracing its customer’s entertainment lives more liberally and taking advantage of what they’ve already got.

In other words, now that BT Vision has stuffed its storefront full of great content, it’s looking for ways to populate the shelves of others. In this example, they’re making a play to build relationships with new customers: ie, gamers – an audience that has absolutely zero history with them.

In effect, BT Vision has abandoned the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality that seems to be driving many service providers to an early grave. Far better to figure out your stronghold in the value chain and play to your strengths. In terms of reaching the customers of tomorrow, clearly the (set top) box holds no value for BT. So they’re piping their brand via someone else’s.

To do this quickly and effectively you’ve got to be able to change your products and your delivery strategy, look at the market and respond to what the different consumer niches really want. If the sun is out, sell barbecues; if it’s raining sell umbrellas. And, like BT, if the customer has already got the means to buy your products, then let them do it….by all means necessary! The digital market is no place to be precious about delivery…

This view has been encouraged because the focus of middleware vendors has been leaning towards the application side – ie, these firms have been looking at what ‘store fronts’ can be created to display the video catalogues that have been acquired by the carriers.

But now more than ever, IPTV middleware should be so such more than just an application layer to help you publish your content. It needs to be the core architecture of an IPTV service, such that it enables service providers to integrate quickly and easily all the other systems (including 3rd party systems) needed to create an all singing and dancing entertainment on-demand offering – eg, VOD servers, security systems, STB and telco back-office systems.

In short, IPTV middleware needs to be the stuff that makes it possible to deliver converged services that allow subscribers to use their TVs in new and exciting ways, not a set of vertical applications

In my view, the IPTV middleware market is only just beginning to develop. This is largely due to the fact that most vendors were slow off the mark and, due to market conditions, they’ve now been left behind with a rough set of ‘tie-in’ software that tends to link content directly to delivery platforms.

We’ve seen that several of today’s largest IPTV implementations in Asia and Europe have used home grown IPTV middleware. But in our discussions, more and more service providers are seeking an extensible and open architecture which will help them upgrade more easily and deliver more compelling services and applications that are based on real customer habits. And, whilst it’s true to say the market isn’t 100% set just yet, we’ve found a strong shared view on this requirement with all of our partners and customers.

So why is middleware so important??

Basically, those service providers that don’t give proper thought to middleware may find themselves in the uncomfortable position of owning a hardwired, inflexible backend infrastructure that precludes them from playing the IPTV field of tomorrow….

At AssetHouse, we feel that IPTV middleware is the most important component in a nascent market. It’s certainly worth a closer look at it here…

IPTV Vendors have already begun replacing their first-generation products with newer technologies that scales better and offer far greater functionality (eg, Cisco has recently developed its own vision of edge routers delivering content…). Yet for the most part, IPTV middleware – the all important stuff that glues a system together – is still a closed solution: to make it work inside a service provider’s stack requires a lot of complex integration with set-top boxes, security systems, VOD servers, and backend servers.

Unfortunately, without shared standards, there is no easy way to do this work. Also, the middleware solutions themselves tend to be monolithic, and usually require a ‘take it or leave it’ approach. (You’re usually limited to whatever applications you’re given as part of a proprietary stack and to create anything new you have a fairly lengthy and costly project on your hands – a fact that’s highlighted by quite a few of the service providers that have gone down this route.)

IPTV middleware vendors say they are working towards an open architecture, but they still disagree about what this architecture should look like, and many disagree about whether it’s best to include middleware as part of an end-to-end solution, or if it should stand alone and work with other best-of-breed components.

We’ve been following some of the current initiatives within the standards bodies. For example, the ITU now has a focus group for IPTV and they are looking across the wider value chain to see where standards can help…. and one of the main areas being addressed is the middleware part.

There’s also a big shift in emphasis from some vendors to offer application programming interfaces (API’s) and software development kits (SDK’s) that allow service providers and third-party developers to build applications on top of their middleware platforms. (Tamblin is one such vendor www.tamblin.com – recently acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). As a result, you can watch web-based TV-type services on your PC today without a single piece of middleware being ‘visible’ in the process.

The approach that AssetHouse has taken is one of openness and flexibility. Rather than use middleware for all aspects of content, product and service management – which tends to tie you to a specific vendor or technology and create a bottleneck in the way you deliver your services – we recommend you always separate content from the application layer.

This way, all aspects related to the management of content and the creation of digital products are done away from the application server, which in turn gives you a whole lot more choice to select whatever IPTV middleware you might need.

Further, I think it’s absolutely crucial to have as many players as possible working on the IPTV technical spectrum to deliver new, creative services.

We’ve seen the benefits of this approach at BT Vision, where AssetFactory takes care of the backend content inventory and proposition management and MSTV is deployed at the set top box end of things. For BT Vision, this selective approach was the first step towards openness and the creation of an environment where the customer has real choice and control and BT has the opportunity to maximize its revenues…. which, of course, is the real reason for creating these services in the first place.

When all’s said and done, it’s encouraging to see the resurrection of middleware, because a discussion about middleware is invariably a discussion about flexibility, openness, choice and service delivery – which are the right kind of discussions for the industry to be having. Whether you’re a service provider or a customer, middleware might just turn out to be the kind of hero we need right now.

AssetHouse, the leaders in Digital Proposition Management software for on-demand entertainment service providers, today announced the availability of a hot new white paper, entitled ‘Build it and they might not come: getting the delivery infrastructure right for TV 2.0.’

The eight page briefing document is essential reading for all ‘on-demand’ entertainment providers, and describes how the YouTube effect is influencing new on-demand consumers; how to build a flexible TV 2.0 infrastructure capable of exploiting new viewer habits; how to avoid recent, expensive mistakes made by ‘on-demand’ service providers; and ‘Return on Content’ – a new metric for the on-demand world.

At the same time, the company is formally unveiling its new web site and ‘Entertainment 2.0’ blog. Designed to cover all the market-shaping aspects of the birth of a new entertainment era, the new blog presents AssetHouse’s latest commercial and technical thinking, fast responses to market developments and a constantly moving interactive debate involving key industry people, ideas and announcements. Recent posts include: IPTV 1.0 vs IPTV 2.0; The Tragic Quadrant: how the back-end players map out; and The Dirty Secret of IPTV. It can be found at: http://www.assethouse.com/resources/blog/.

The start of 2008 also marks an important point for the company and the wider entertainment on-demand and IPTV marketplace. An array of recent AssetHouse partnerships is shifting the industry into fast forward mode – with the aim of promoting and providing an altogether more flexible infrastructure that will allow service providers to deliver meaningful and compelling on-demand and IPTV content products to highly motivated consumers.

Recent partnering initiatives from AssetHouse include reseller deals with Tech Mahindra in Asia and a joint marketing intiative with Nortel.

Tech Mahindra – one of Asia’s entertainment powerhouses – has agreed to sell Asset Factory™, AssetHouse’s Digital Product Management solution, as a part of its Asian IPTV rollout strategy. This is a major play that will let any single content operation manage products across IPTV, Broadband and Mobile delivery channels.

Nortel Solutions has signed a Heads of Agreement with AssetHouse to deliver its next generation TV 2.0 infrastructure globally.

About AssetHouse

AssetHouse enables Content Producers to maximise the profitability of their content, Operators to deliver smarter, more profitable products, and Broadcasters and Web TV firms to deliver new products to a wider variety of interactive, Internet-based channels.

We call it Digital Proposition Management and it approaches the on-demand content business from a retailer’s point of view. Unlike the passive, hard-wired model, our Asset Factory™ software lets you step outside of delivery ‘silos’ to actively sell, cross-sell and merchandise differentiated content products, promotions, packages and price plans.

Asset House was founded in 2000 and is based in Guildford, UK.

It deals with the some of the religious platform and user experience debates that lie ahead of us in this brave new world of ‘TV 2.0’. To this end, I’d encourage you to read it if you’re about to embark on a project to build a new IPTV or ‘entertainment on-demand’ service.

Why? Well, for starters it’ll give you an inside view on a wide spectrum of service infrastructure choices and delivery models – ranging from those that tend to put users in charge of creating their own entertainment experiences to those that tend to deliver a more traditional broadcast experience on a time-shifting basis…. as well as discussing the pros and cons of each.

The crux of the matter is that platform choices really do matter, and that seemingly technocratic choices can be make or break in terms of a service provider’s ability to adapt to an increasingly sophisticated viewing market.

Not that we’d recommend you treat your users as plain old ‘viewers’ any more. We’ve given up on that idea – too old hat. In our estimation, the real action will follow those service providers that are able to treat their audiences as true ‘customers’, and start behaving more like retailers of targeted, personalised entertainment products.

But I’m giving the game away here. If you’d like to learn more about what it’s going to take to crack TV 2.0, then check out the paper now. It’s also available as a .pdf download if you need a little extra reading material on the train home tonight.

Most new on-demand entertainment offers risk missing the future by mimicking the past.

Entertainment service providers are spending billions of dollars on new on-demand infrastructures to deliver a range of new digital entertainment services in what is expected to be a vast consumer market. But many of them are stuck in the old broadcast mindset of the last century: stick content on a shelf and let people watch it.

In the next generation of digital entertainment services – called TV 2.0 – this won’t wash. To gain critical mass, TV 2.0 will unequivocally be different, enabling a more web-like, engaging user experience for those that really want it, not just a ‘sit back’ one that looks just like every other TV service. It will be designed from the ground up to deliver the true interactivity and personalization Internet-savvy consumers have shown they want in their droves.

To win, service providers need to act more like retailers and less like broadcasters, able to tweak their supply chain quickly to respond profitably to inevitable and frequent changes in consumers’ desires.

Success depends on being able to:

• Quickly turn content assets into profitable entertainment products
• Save money through smarter buying and packaging
• Build a more nimble, scalable, multi-channel content business
• Provide an open infrastructure that delivers quality of service while allowing customers to explore new ways to enjoy and interact with content.

The opportunities are enormous, particularly for existing content players and communications providers, who stand to reinvent themselves as the digital entertainment brands for the on-demand world. But getting the business model wrong means burning a large amount of money to generate a tiny stream of revenues.

The good news is that most of today’s incumbents are extremely well placed to succeed. They either already own (or operate within) high quality delivery networks that enable them to control the digital entertainment services they deliver to consumers; or they have long-established relationships (together with the customer service systems that support them) with millions of potential customers because they’ve provided voice and broadband services to them for many years. (And some, of course, enjoy both positions.)

Despite these clear and potentially decisive advantages, many companies that have invested in the first generation of entertainment on-demand services are uncertain about the right approach to take. To be successful, they need to ensure they treat consumers as ‘TV 2.0 customers’ rather than as passive ‘viewers’ – and that they do so by embracing the recent lessons of social media and web 2.0 services that have changed our media habits profoundly.

Entertainment in a web 2.0 world

Today’s broadcast model is evolving into a new world of anytime, anywhere, highly interactive and increasingly personalized entertainment – whether it’s delivered to a TV, a PC or a mobile phone (or all three). Unlike yesterday’s entertainment business, it’s maniacally focused on delivering the right kind of content propositions to the consumer – on their terms.

The common blog has a lot to answer for in this respect. Since going mainstream the blog has inspired a variety of ‘user generated’ applications and media destinations that would have seemed outlandish at the time of the first internet bubble.

As a result, ‘the user is now in charge’ has become the mantra of many cutting-edge entertainment on-demand thinkers. To them, the ‘TV experience’ is already dead, the role of the broadcaster is marginalised, and editorial choice is now completely in the hands of the viewer. Joost and Babelgum are good examples of IPTV service providers that play to these kinds of user values. Both are delivering new functionality ‘over the top’ of a traditional viewing experience – such as IM (instant messaging), and content rating and tagging – and their innovation is sure to have a profound near-term effect on how the wider on-demand market will deliver its services to customers.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are a wealth of other providers that represent the first wave of on-demand entertainment services. Unfortunately, many of these have been rushed to market with very little focus on long-term openness or flexibility. As a result, most are guilty of a cardinal sin: they lock their content to their delivery mechanism and are not flexible or open enough to support newer flavours of web-centric services or more progressive on-demand entertainment products.

It’s a small, seemingly technical decision that has had dramatic business implications – but it means most of today’s mainstream on-demand services are built on foundations that…

• Make it harder to create new content propositions and launch new services
• Restrict the ability to package, promote and cross-sell
• Obscure visibility into what is actually owned and licensed
• Severely limit content exploitation opportunities
• Waste money on inefficient back end processes
• Inhibit responsiveness to the market
• Put a ceiling on growth
• Make it difficult to integrate kind of web-based services that the market wants

Clearly this position is untenable given the rapid shifts in service delivery models and customer expectations that Joost et al are promoting. We all want more content, more flexibility and more functionality, on our terms.

As it stands, the only sensible position for on-demand service providers to take today is to hedge a little in terms of the way platforms are built and services are delivered. This is because the old adage (taken from the movie ‘Field of Dreams’) that ‘if you build it, they will come’ will never be true for new on-demand entertainment service providers. The market moves too quickly and too unpredictably to place long term bets in this fashion.

As such, this paper discusses what service providers need to do to adapt to the new world of consumer interactivity and build the kind of open and flexible TV 2.0 infrastructure that will succeed, and allow them to:

• Get their content to market faster and at lower cost
• Deliver compelling, differentiated experiences for increasingly knowledgeable consumers
• Respond quickly to new marketing and advertising ideas and opportunities
• Actively sell content instead of waiting for users to buy
• Grow their services in an open and flexible manner, enabling them to respond quickly to new service and functionality opportunities

The rise and rise of IPTV

Today’s key battleground for TV 2.0 centres on the deployment of IPTV services.

Analysts are predicting that there will be around 50 million worldwide subscribers for IPTV services by 2009, delivering up to $40 billion in revenues. Infonetics Research, for example, says capital investment in IPTV is expected to increase by almost 1,400% over the next four years.

In their new IPTV Global Forecast – 2006 to 2009, MRG (Multimedia Research Group) argues that Europe is surging ahead with a large number of strong IPTV deployments that include France Telecom, Free, Neuf in France, Telefonica in Spain, FastWeb in Italy, BT in the UK and a number of strong competitive offerings in Scandinavia. According to MRG, IPTV set-top boxes will dominate the capital spending for IPTV services and account for two-thirds of cap-ex spending.

It expects that global IPTV subscribers will grow to as many as 53 million by 2009, and that in the meantime service providers will invest rapidly increasing amounts on IPTV content and transport equipment. Another analyst, Infonetics, expects that in 2009, $26 billion of worldwide service provider capital expenditure will be devoted to building IPTV networks – and, whilst they agree with MRG that Europe is leading the way right now, Infonetics predicts that IPTV subscribers in North America will expand more than 40-fold between 2005 and 2009.

Predictions vs reality

The opportunity is clearly huge. But this rampant optimism is yet to be fully matched by consumer reality. The largest IPTV service anywhere (nowTV in Hong Kong) has just passed 500,000 subscribers and most of the rest have fewer than 100,000.

Building a TV 2.0 infrastructure

What service providers are starting to learn is that to deliver on the promise of TV 2.0 they need infrastructures that can easily and quickly:

• Turn content assets into profitable products – quickly, easily and at lower cost
• Save money – by efficiently buying, packaging and delivering content products
• Make money – by creating, promoting and cross-selling compelling offers
• Be open and flexible enough to integrate 3rd party applications and content from other service providers
• Build a more profitable, scalable content business – that’s differentiated in any channel and ready for new channels

In the past, interacting with the TV meant using the remote to change channels. Today you can record multiple programmes at the same time. Soon you’ll be able to set preference rules so the right content can seek you out, and find out what other viewers think of things before, during and after you’re watching.

TV 2.0 transforms today’s one-way TV experience by remixing it with a variety of web-like experiences that we’ve all come to know and love. Imagine choosing to watch the latest James Bond movie, using IM to communicate with Bond-philes throughout the film and, when it’s finished, then opting to view a ‘Director’s Commentary’ bonus feature as well as various out-takes from the film. In this way, TV 2.0 offers the potential not only to personalize user content but also to embed advertising as well as permitted interaction with a vast array of supporting user- and service provider-generated content.

The test of a TV 2.0 infrastructure then is to deliver:

• Interactivity – where consumers can control what they consume, comment on what they like and listen to others (‘more Internet, less TV’), and mix media, such as watching video while chatting on MSN or browsing Facebook
• A personalized experience- not providing the same set of packages to everyone
• Integration across channels – allowing consumers to set preferences via an EPG on a mobile phone and watch over set top box and comment via IM with a like minded community
• Convenience – allowing consumers to watch what they want when they want to in whatever form they want
• Transactions – permitting hundreds of thousands of people to buy different things rather than providing a few undifferentiated packages
• An on-demand, mix-and-match environment – ie, not ‘broadcast’

Return on Content

The winners will be the brands that can stand out from the pack, deliver great experiences, actively sell content instead of waiting for people to buy, and enable seamless integration of third party applications and services (often straight from the web). Service providers are already investing a fortune creating and licensing the hottest films, games, music and video content. They need a platform that will help them play smart, be agile and adapt to viewer demands and new ideas, trends and opportunities.

They must be able to:

• Create compelling, differentiated content experiences
• Get content to market faster
• Better manage the supply of content
• Create new products and bundles easily and cheaply
• Respond faster to what works and what doesn’t
• Cross-sell more effectively
• Deliver to new channels without re-inventing the wheel
• Integrate third party applications and services into their programming
• Deploy content assets in multiple propositions from day one
• Create new advertiser opportunities
• Maximise advertiser value

Introducing AssetFactory

AssetFactory™ from AssetHouse is a new Digital Proposition Management software solution that helps service providers acquire their content assets more effectively and turn them into profitable on-demand products quickly, easily and at lower cost. We call it Digital Proposition Management and it approaches the on-demand content business from a retailer’s point of view.

Unlike the passive, hard-wired model, AssetFactory™ lets you step outside of delivery ‘silos’ to actively sell, cross-sell and merchandise differentiated content products, promotions, packages and price plans.

AssetFactory™ also helps you drive inefficiencies out of buying, packaging and delivering your content by enabling you to deploy your assets in multiple service propositions: for example, concurrent streams and themes (entertainment and news), multiple channels (PC, TV, phone) and different delivery models (subscriptions, PPV, ad-based).

AssetFactory™ enables you to:

• Buy time: think like a retailer and plan and research your on-demand markets, products, pricing and promotions before negotiating your content deals. Is that Spiderman Trilogy tie-in really a great idea? Know the facts before you buy the rights.

• Buy smarter: become a better negotiator by bringing your product research to the table. Know what content you already have on the shelf, where it is and what rights you have for its use. Know exactly what you need, where you need it and for how long in order to turn content acquisitions into profits quickly. Don’t buy blind again.

• Make money faster: once you’ve acquired your content, get it to market quicker, and in a more profitable, productized format. Deploy your content with more agility: build new service bundles and pricing packages that reflect new customer trends and opportunities. If you’re holding a smash hit, stretch it in new ways – make Sex and the City work harder as part of a ‘Sex on a Sunday’ stream.

• Reduce risk: Plan, productize and promote. Start small and scale fast as demand increases. Employ a ‘beta’ mentality so you can test, tweak and repeat new service packages until you create the winners. Then back them with confidence.

• Maximise ad value and opportunities: deliver better data alongside better products and promotions and demonstrate more value to your advertisers. Find niche markets with targeted products and monetise them through new branding opportunities. Create new, channel-specific, advertising-led services that deliver new opportunities for your advertisers – and get them on board at the earliest possible stage. Carling may own Premiership football, but Budweiser may jump at the chance to back PC-delivered Euro 2008 goal packages.

• Maximise content profitability: content assets are worth twice as much in AssetFactory™ – because once they’re inside your inventory you can really make them sweat. Quickly redeploy them into other products and services to create more value for customers and more revenue for you. Benefit fully from brand Beckham – redeploy his latest LA Galaxy goal into a Spice Girls trailer, on the fly.

• Find (and profit from) your ‘Long Tail’: exploit the interactivity of IPTV and help your customers to locate the value of your content inventory. Make it searchable, and make everything available on-demand. Let your customers create their own interactive products and services…. and learn from them so that you can increase the value of your advertising and deliver new services. From Seinfeld to Sergeant Bilko – know an archive trend when you see one and act fast to productize it.

• Reduce operational costs: automate your key scheduling and inventory processes. Do more with fewer people. Know what you have, where it is, and what state it’s in so that you can deliver new services at speed and with low overheads.

• Increase reach: deliver new services quickly via new channels. Outflank your competition by getting there first. Own the customer via as many touch points as possible – phones, TV, PC and beyond. Feeling the pinch of the TV Set Top box in certain markets? Then grab your audience by the web instead.

• Reduce churn and maximise customer revenue: increase the value of your services by improving the customer experience. Deliver products in a personalized, easily accessible format. Productize better – provide customers with other related services, such as exclusive catch up and preview facilities. Promote your content in smarter ways, with value-added content assets. If your most loyal customers are Daniel Craig fans, then show them his ’Actors Archive’ – and deliver the option to view Layer Cake straight to their Home Page, along with e-commerce deals on the soundtrack).

How it works

AssetFactory™ is a browser-based software solution that integrates key content processes into a comprehensive product development and delivery environment:

AssetFactory^TM is a browser-based software solution that integrates key content processes into a comprehensive product development and delivery environment:

Content and Advertising Inventory Management
Manages the catalog of content (including advertising) and attaches metadata to describe the content to make it easier to package, promote, cross-sell and deliver.

Contract Management
Centralises all contract information and adds essential metadata tags (such as price, license window, usage rules, etc). Eliminates double-licensing, off-strategy purchasing and expensive contract breaches.

Product, Pricing and Schedule Management
Enables editors to create schedules, place orders, develop promotions, set price packages and run service trials and pilots.

Publishing Management
Ensures content is dispatched in the right form for the target delivery application.

Quality Management and Reporting
Ensures content is properly encoded for its destination channel, checks final product assembly and establishes accurate in and out points. Provides viewer, contract and advertising data to enable editors and to create analyse all the relevant KPI’s.

Metadata (attaching key attribute tags) lies at the heart of the AssetFactory™, streamlining communication between components and delivering all relevant information to the point of decision.

Conclusion

Unless service providers can build the right kinds of open and flexible infrastructures for the new world of on-demand entertainment, they risk losing their current (old world) advantages. In effect, the ability to bring viewer benefits like interactivity, personalization, choice and additional ‘over the top’ supporting services are likely to be more critical success factors than all of the things that their current business models deliver so well.

Think about how today’s entertainment on-demand brands are being built: are web-savvy consumers taking call centres, customer support capabilities and network reliability into account when making their entertainment choices? Or are they more concerned with finding and experiencing the services that they really want here and now?

Our money’s on the latter. So should yours – because consumer loyalties are being built, but not necessarily on your current terms.

How AssetHouse helped BT Vision to change the rules

Check out how BT Vision uses AssetFactory™ to handle the whole digital proposition life cycle from content acquisition, through contract management and exploitation, proposition development and promotion to final delivery to the end customer.

In our ‘Infrastructure Action Quadrant’ I described the difference between single channel plays and multi-channel plays, and why it’s important to build something that allows you to get your stuff to as many ’store fronts’ as possible. I also described the difference between focusing on raw content and your overall service proposition, and why you need to build a system that gives you the flexibility to mix, match and remix all your precious content assets.

As well as helping us to get a grip on the whole vendor marketplace, these technical and functional directions also help to describe the evolution of today’s infrastructure solutions, and where the smart money is when it comes to making technology bets for tomorrow.

Let’s look at the Quadrant again….

Top right is where we recommend you focus – on building systems that allow you to operate ‘retail’ fashion, creating compelling products based on viewer wants and needs, and delivering them to as many folks as possible, through as many store fronts as you wish.

Now, you’d expect us to say that, right, since we sit firmly in this part of the chart. But the other way of looking at things is in historical terms. I doubt anyone would want to occupy the space to the left or to the base of the matrix…. but they do, and there’s a reason why.

The first generation of on-demand / IPTV services tended to be hastily compiled to address a single delivery channel or type of content asset. For example, you can very easily access last night’s TV programs via the web today. In itself this isn’t too technically challenging – you take a pre-existing asset, re-purpose it for another channel, and wait for folks to access it.

The problem with this method of ‘on-demand’ delivery is that it’s not that inspiring. It’s all about ‘repeat’ functionality – a repeat of the viewing experience that we’re all used to.

Now I’m not saying this is a bad thing… it’s just not the only thing, and as a service provider you need to be thinking how to deliver interactive entertainment experiences that are more in-tune with today’s web-savvy consumer.

So, at a very basic level, when it comes to building the right infrastructure you should be thinking multi-channel and interactive. Simple, huh? Well, not if you choose the wrong technology platform.

If you want to ‘think like a retailer’ and deliver your on-demand entertainment / IPTV services into a multitude of store fronts then you need to make a very fundamental technology choice: do you choose middleware that’s tightly integrated with the user interface and his or her device, or do you go for something more loosely coupled?

Or, in other words, do you choose an IPTV 1.0 solution or an IPTV 2.0 solution?

Here’s another diagram:

As mentioned, the first IPTV-style services were built on a software stack that ‘piped’ raw content assets into ‘catalogue’ style products, from which users could pick whatever was made available. And that’s about as interactive as it got.

Now, this wasn’t because service providers lacked the vision to create all-singing, all-dancing interactive entertainment services, but because yesterday the technology choices were more limited.

The supporting software tended to be developed either downwards or upwards from established positions at the back end or the user device. In other words, in some scenarios, interface or device-level operating system vendors (I mention no names) established a foothold at the consumer end of the stack and hastily cobbled together a software solution that could cope with the publishing and content management and delivery requirements of a total on-demand / IPTV system. Which in turn meant that the resulting solutions were shot through with whatever device and/or asset management and publishing flavours they favoured. Which ultimately resulted in a bunch of semi-myopic services, produced by some regretful (and out of pocket) service providers.

Well, that was then and this is now.

At AssetHouse, we believe a brighter future for entertainment on-demand / IPTV will be secured by building more flexible, agnostic middleware stacks that are capable of delivering content products to any number of consumer store fronts. Check out AssetFactory to see what I mean…

Now, this is incredibly important to us at AssetHouse, because we’re innovating and moving the market into the places it needs to be. Frankly speaking, we’ve seen service providers make some howlers in the past few years, and so part of our mission is to ensure that our customers don’t do the same.

The crux of the issue is this… If you’re an on-demand or IPTV service provider, then you need to ensure you can exploit your content as quickly as possible and via whatever channel and within whatever service bundle you please. At the same time, you want the agility to package and price your services based on the market’s wants and needs.

Sounds pretty sensible, right? Unfortunately, that’s not how everyone in the market sees it.

From a vendor’s viewpoint, infrastructure solutions are drawn across two important axes:

Your position along the second axis will determine what it is you’re actually capable of delivering to consumers. If your infrastructure’s built at the ‘Content Management’ end of things, then you’re essentially enabling the throughput of your raw content assets as they stand. Whereas at the other end of the scale, if your infrastructure is flexible enough to allow you to mix, match, bundle and package your content in innovative ways, then you’re more likely to be in the business of delivering content ‘propositions’ that have a far higher propensity to engage with today’s media- and web-savvy viewers (of course, we place our own solution here).

Back to the pen and the napkin….

What we have here is a good old matrix to describe functionality, reach, and a general ability to cope with market direction and consumer desires in the IPTV / on-demand arena.

So, I’ve taken the leap and committed these ideas to Powerpoint. Here’s the result:

You’ll see I’ve labeled each part of the quadrant and provided some example vendors to illustrate the point. To the left are those that concentrate their solutions on one store front. To the right are those that deliver through multiple store fronts. At the bottom are those that tie content assets into a single style of ‘pre-packaged’ delivery. At the top are those that provide a more flexible, integrated approach to delivering content propositions (ie, a retail-like, selling functionality that’s more closely aligned to what consumers are really after).

We’re in the top right. The real action section of the quadrant if you like. We think you should be too.

(PS: at AssetHouse we try to summarise the general technical infrastructure requirement in one simple phrase: ‘Think like a retailer.’ It’s a useful way of simplifying the technocratic fluff in a nascent marketplace.)

Now that BT, Orange and others own the plumbing and the pipe into the living room (via new broadband and data services), the next frontier is the provision of content-rich services to TV sets…. AKA digital television.

However, unlike previous (successful) telco forays into the home, TV customers care more about fluffy things like entertainment than quality of service, billing and call centres. So firms that wish to transform themselves into complete digital entertainment service providers face some very different challenges that lie outside of their comfort zone.

TV services are a very tough nut to crack. Aside from needing to offer rich viewing experiences, the elephant in the room is the free-to-air services that we’re already very familiar and happy with.

What telco’s need to figure out is why customers would want to pay for their stuff….especially when what we see of their first ‘entertainment on demand’ style efforts look so similar to the things we can already access on terrestrial TV.

But there is hope – and a good deal of it.

IPTV – what we here at AssetHouse call TV 2.0 – can give telcos a few super-cool weapons of their own: like personalization, new kinds of content, and ‘over the top’ services ranging from new forms of advertising to new interactive tools that are content-related – such as instant messaging for chat, e-commerce, and tagging and recommendation apps.

In practice, this could be the ace in the sleeve for the average telco. Introducing new content on the turn of a dime, offering personalised schedules and introducing new web apps, all require some serious technical know-how and flexibility at the back end – exactly the kind of skills that telcos have in spades.

That’s where we’re focusing our efforts – to help IPTV service providers to act smart and deliver differentiated products to their store fronts – stuff that’s built around new consumer wants and needs…. an innovative blend of services that can’t be gotten on bog standard television.

As mentioned, it’s a big challenge…but a necessary one, In order to succeed, IPTV service offerings have to be different. And, whilst there’s a lot of work to be done in building the right kind of agility into the plumbing, we’re getting there. (Take BT Vision, for example – an AssetHouse customer)

But in the meantime, has anyone out there seen some real differentiation in current telco offerings…other than plain old content???

There seems to be lots of good things coming out of CES in the US this week…. We’ll comment on this stuff later on.

Three of the top broadcasters joining together to create a shared on-demand platform. Looks interesting and I can see in principle how it offers all three the chance to share costs and open an exploitation channel for their own content.

Will it attract the other broadcasters?

Yes, I’d say for those that have their own libraries of material, as the logic remains the same.

Will it attract new content from the big producers?

Not so sure about this. At the end of the day the broadcasters value-add was to buy spectrum and create play out, for this they got a cartel that’s been in place for over thirty years.

I’d think that the content producers would have a strong case to argue that they own the brand equity; Big Brother, Pop Idol…. Will they be so keen to hand control back to the broadcasters again?

I’d think its not that clear. What is clear though is that if Kangaroo is to succeed it had better learn how to become the Tescos of content pretty quickly!