The entertainment on-demand ‘Action Quadrant’: how the infrastructure scene is shaking out
04/02/08 BY Jonathan Callcut
This one’s been on my chest for a while. Each time I speak to a customer, a partner or anyone else that plays in the IPTV / entertainment on-demand space, I find myself reaching for a ballpoint pen and a napkin in order to describe the technical landscape.
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:
Depending on where your technical infrastructure is positioned along the first axis will mean the difference between delivering content into just one place, or as many store fronts as makes sense to your business. (Clearly, the latter is more commercially attractive from both a near- and long-term perspective.)
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.)
