The Dirty Secret of IPTV
01/12/07 BY Jonathan Callcut
There’s a dirty little secret lurking inside just about every IPTV business in the world today:
Behind the slick marketing and the (more or less) pretty face, there’s invariably a back-end plagued by inefficiency, dependent on manual processes and held together with sticky tape.
The kinds of things we see routinely:
- Licensing a movie two or three times because nobody knows what’s actually been bought.
- Letting an expensive piece of content sit around unexploited while the licensing window ticks away.
- Locking content to one specific delivery package, so it can’t be easily re-packaged, bundled or promoted in new ways.
- Chasing quality nightmares like encoding for the wrong front-end application or setting incorrect in and out points.
This is emphatically NOT just about making life easier for the back-end team (though there’s nothing wrong with that). It’s about building a scalable business that actually makes money.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many IPTV services suffer from these problems. We’re all pioneering a new medium here. Trying to anticipate the needs of a complex system that’s never been built before is a non-trivial matter.
But now, with experience, we know a lot about the things that can cripple an on-demand entertainment service.
If your back end is still not fit-for-purpose, it should bother you.
