The “new way of watching TV” has been in the spotlight the last few days. What is striking is that all parties involved want to have their say. This indicates two things: first, the market, after years of botched attempts, is finally ripe; and second, it is still not clear who the winner is.
As for timing: the market is only now really ready for "Connected TV" (see Telecompaper research brief "Connected TV") or over-the-top (OTT content, see Telecompaper research brief "OTT: distribution as a scenario” ), because of the success of video on the web. Now that YouTube or catch-up TV programme sites have opened the way for video on the internet, it’s a shoe in that technology has to develop the biggest and brightest screen in the house, to quote Google.
As for the winner: it’s a wait and watch situation and one could even ask whether there really will be a “winner”. Just look at recent developments, those highlighting different parties see that these are working with a variety of partners.
• 12 mei: Liberty Global announced a ‘next generation set-top box’, one which added OTT-content to broadcast content. Partners include Samsung, Intel, NDS and Nagravision, and the box is scheduled for market launch in H1 2011 by UPC (see our background article "Comcast and UPC can learn something from each other).
• May 20: Google Announces Google TV, to debut in the US in the fall. Partners (again) include Intel, Adobe, Sony, Logitech, Dish and Best Buy (see our research brief "Google TV", out soon). The product is optimised for Dish, but should be able to run on any network.
• May 28: Rumours abound about a new version of Apple TV, a media player reportedly using iPhone 4 as the operating system.
• June 1: Telstra launches its T-Box (made by Netgem), which it has ben testing for a half year. A nice point to note is that much of Telstra's own content delivery network (CDN) is brought close to the customer, so that its broadband quota is not used for viewing web content on TV.
• June 1: Philips is working with TeliaSonera International Carrier to deliver content for Philips Net TV. VideoLand will help out in the Benelux. The Philips Net TV offers customised versions of websites such as YouTube and Dailymotion (as compared to Panasonic's Viera Cast, see our commentary "Time is running out for operators who want to earn with OTT”)
This list shows us participants other than Google, the champion of OTT-content. Despite its great market weight, Google brings to the table the greatest number of partners, not to mention thousands of developers worldwide working on applications for Google TV, as well as hardware makers such as Apple and Philips, cable company Liberty Global and telecom company Telstra.
We can conclude that everyone wants a piece of the OTT-market poised to take off. Operators such as UPC and Telstra have the advantage of an existing customer relationship for both TV and broadband services. They just have to replace their existing STB with a next-gen STB. It is very doubtful whether Google, Apple and Philips -three very strong consumer brands- will be able to grab a substantial part of the market.
