Amino + AssetHouse = IPTV Profits on Demand
16/10/08 BY Andrew Burke
Having created BT Vision in the past and now taking the helm at Amino, it is no surprise that I’m a die-hard IPTV believer. But at the same time I’m a realist. Currently, it may feel like IPTV is on ‘pause’ – but to me it is going through a natural and important transition. We do have great, innovative companies and service offerings in this space, but many of them are Serving the old and not focusing on the new.
This is the context for Amino’s acquisition of AssetHouse. With AssetHouse on board, Amino can start to deliver more radical solutions to market. AssetHouse creates ‘digital proposition management’ software that enables Entertainment On Demand service providers – telcos, content owners, web players – to think and act like a retailer and approach the business of IPTV (and all its variants) in a more commercial way than before.
What do I mean here? Well, in many ways, IPTV as we know it is broken. As an industry we’re yet to attract consumers and advertisers to our door in sufficient numbers. Why? Well, the main reason is simply because we’ve been too busy focusing on the business of plumbing than creating great entertainment products that really exploit IP-based media. As a result, we see a lot of technically excellent ‘all you can eat’ buffet-style subscription services that fulfill the ‘on demand’ component of our customer’s needs, but fall short of giving them something to really rave about.
When I created BT Vision – some four years ago – my business plan was full of interactivity up-side. But as always, market adoption has been a lot slower than I expected. To paraphrase Bill Gates – ‘Nothing ever happens as fast as you expect but when it does happen it goes much faster than you can imagine’. I think we’re at that point now…
The challenge for Amino and the industry at large is to deliver really compelling services that provide a better, more personalised, more exciting, and more social mix of entertainment experiences. And this is where our work with Asset House comes in…
Broadly speaking, our work together is addressing the following three key areas….
1: Getting the Packaging Right for TV 2.0
TV 2.0. Social TV. Web 2.0 on the large screen. It’s a compelling vision: all the interactivity which is working so well on the web transferred to the television.
But this simplistic view of a brave new world is flawed.
TV is a 10 foot, lean back experience and the PC is a one foot, lean forward experience. The two don’t sit very easily together. User interfaces are different. Hardware is different (armchairs vs desk chairs!). Tasks and intentions are different.
Creating a user experience which blends the two together in just the right combination is the key.
Today, I’m seeing demos which show what my Facebook friends are watching and how much they rate those programmes. I see Voice-over-IP channels opened up between two households to allow shouting at the Spurs match to be shared amongst different households. I see widgets filling the screen informing me of the weather forecast, my stock portfolio performance and the traffic issues on my route to work. I see content from the open internet – referred to as Over-the-Top or OTT video – appearing alongside my favourite broadcasted content. I see my music, pictures and video stored on my home network filling my TV screen. I like what I see but I know that their attractiveness primarily appeals to the geek in me. And this is a wow factor that won’t necessarily convince a million people to sign up for the ride.
In short, we need to find the right packaging for these great new services.
2: Knowing Our Consumers (Really Knowing Them!)
The next piece we’re working on is harnessing the ‘power of feedback’ at the core of our IPTV offerings.
So many other sectors use the analysis of consumption as a critical part of their selling success. Take Tesco. They use Dunnhumby (www.dunhumby.com) to analyse who’s buying what on their loyalty card. This analysis can identify whether your wife is pregnant by all the nappies, talc and sleepsuits she buys in advance of the happy day or whether your son has left for college based on a major drop in fast food purchases. So why don’t we understand the TV viewer as well?
It’s not rocket science. We need better data and better analysis. We need to define the metrics that are important – content watched, menu dwell times, quality and speed of response, viewing device, etc – and then marry what we learn with our production efforts so that we can create better services.
3: We Need to Think Like a Retailer
Any good TV experience is made up of a collection of content assets displayed on a screen. An example of a high value asset is a movie. Now, with the advent of TV 2.0, we’re starting to display all sorts of new assets on the screen: an EPG listing, a movie synopsis, an advert, a Facebook widget, a logo, etc….
The trick for delivering a truly relevant, contextual, valuable, consistent customer experience through the TV screen depends on effectively collating the right assets together in the right place at the right time – in understanding and creating winning associations.
This, essentially, is what great retailers do all the time. From Tesco to Amazon, their key skill lies in packaging and presenting compelling combinations of products, services and offers.
We need to get better at doing the same with our IPTV services: in embedding personalisation, content, branding and sponsorship associations in programming, menus and interfaces. This is the stuff that will deliver the real lift in ARPU.
Granted, it takes a new breed of system to do this: but, basically, that’s why we acquired AssetHouse. AssetFactory from AssetHouse helps IPTV service providers to understand their customers and become more sophisticated content merchandisers. Our joint mission is to enable these firms to think and behav
