Can telcos compete with ‘Free TV’?
08/01/08 BY Sandip Sarda
For telcos, 2008 is a new year with a new challenge. The race for set top box (STB) is on.
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.
