Venus Telephone, a tiny operator in the town of Venus in Pennsylvania, is switching to a new system for digital TV, supplied by Skitter. TV. The little company will also make a move towards IPTV. Now, Venus Telephone, with 1,276 lines and 700 video subscribers, cannot really be seen as representative of the telecom sector, but a statement in its press release is worth looking at more closely.
“In addition to reducing customer cord-cutting, Venus Telephone expects their Skitter.TV offering to help monetize their broadband service. According to Keister (headend manager at Venus – ed.), 30 to 40 percent of their Internet traffic comes from streaming video today.”
In October 2010, Sandvine announced that Netflix alone provides more than 20 percent of the download traffic in the US in the evening peak hours (20.00 to 22.00). If one takes Venus Telecom as a guide, than Sandvine's words are not an overstatement. Network operators have long known that streaming takes up a lot of bandwidth, of course, but must now be warned of a future where streaming will take on ever growing importance. Netflix has 'only' 10 million subscribers who use its streaming service - and not even all at once. And even though the average TV is not really broadband connected yet, streaming already accounts for 30-40 of traffic. With connected TV, we will go from a download culture (a web page, a document, a song, a movie) to a culture dominated by streaming video. As a result, overbooking can only be applied in a more moderate fashion, with the necessary consequences, particularly for 'shared' networks (HFC, GPON, mobile).
The first part of the quotation is also noteworthy: "help monetize their broadband service.” Connected TV will in the next few years trigger a revolution in television land, with broadcast TV losing ground to web and on-demand content, which in fact will allow operators to make money via revenue sharing. But the good news for operators is that their broadband service will become more valuable. After all, TV will also end up with a broadband connection for streaming. And we are not even yet mentioning other screens, which will probably be connected to broadband via WiFi.
In short, connected TV will in the coming years really put network operators to work.
Telecompaper is organizing on 27 April the Connected TV 2011 conference.
