I think this boils down to content is king, but success only comes to content creators who make the best use of ever changing distribution media, to get their stuff out. Bert -------------------------------- Broadcasters' "parasites" dissected at IBC David Benjamin (09/12/2008 10:37 AM EDT) URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210601290 AMSTERDAM - More than eighty years after inventors on three different continents almost simultaneously generated the first television images, a lively group of technologist and broadcasters here at IBC " led by Leonardo Chiariglione, founder of the Motion Picture Experts Group " perpetuated the seemingly eternal argument about which is more important: What's on TV or what makes TV go. The crux of this argument today, as Chiariglione noted, comes down to what he calls WIM TV " the convergence of the Web, Internet protocol (IP) and mobile television, technologies that extend television away from the traditional living-room TV set and beyond the control of traditional broadcasters. Such technologies, said Chiariglione, are necessary to the satisfaction of consumers who expect to watch TV in a host of non-traditional places and ways. "Unless you keep the customer happy," said Chiariglione, "nothing is going to happen upstream." He proceeded to lay out a series of opportunities, challenges and threats faced by broadcasters in an era when technological change has increased exponentially and the "cost of innovation gets lower by the day." Chiariglione punctuated this point by citing his own "indetermination principle of media," which mandates that the industry can never ignore an advance in technology. "When someone introduces something new in media," he said, "you immediately change." The "what's on TV" response to Chiariglione came in the form of a taped interview with Michael Grade, executive chairman of ITV, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster. Emphasizing that content is always primary in media, he counters Chiariglione's declining innovation cost scale by saying that "The value of content is just getting greater and greater," along with the expense of creating content. He noted that the concept for just one TVshow, "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire," sold for 120 million pounds. Grade said that the broadcast industry's roadside is "littered with people who worshipped technology rather than content. He referred to the many new platforms for video distribution beyond broadcast, covered under Chiariglione's WIM TV rubric, as mere "railway lines" that serve to carry content. Grade took specific aim at Internet aggregators of video content from various sources, such as Google. "The day that Google spends a billion pounds a year on content production, I'll start to worry," said Grade. "They're all parasites. They just live off our content. As long as we can create content, content is the keys to the castle." Grade's interviewer " and the moderator of the IBC panel " British journalist Raymond Snoddy, undercut Grade's position somewhat by noting that ITV had recently slipped from the list of UK's 100 top companies and has been cited as a possible takeover target. Part of ITV's problem has been its difficulties in adapting to the challenges of Internet protocol TV (IPTV) and others. Another panelist, Andrew Setos, president of engineering for the Fox Group, put the problem for Grade and his industry into a nutshell. "The world isn't coming to an end. It's changing," he said. "It means we have to be more agile." Panelist Lieven Vermaele, technical department director for the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), elaborated. "Look at the broadcast industry," he said. "In terms of technological evolution, we were always in control." Vermaele cited a number of historic TV advances listed by Chiariglione, from color TV to stereo, to higher resolution and the introduction of personal video recorders (PVR). "In the broadband domain, with new technology out of our control, we are now squeezed into a corner, trying to react," said Vermaele. But he offered a scenario for change. Content, said Vermaele, remains primary but must be followed swiftly by offering the original broadcast content on the various platforms covered under WIM TV, followed by building additional applications, services and revenue opportunities around the content. David Pendleton, chief operating officer for ABC of Australia, summed it up: "Monetizing content is the name of the game." Setos chimed in, recalling Grade's reference to Google and other aggregators as "parasites." The Internet has created a class of users referred to by Snoddy as "dot.communists " people who want everything for free." Setos said that the flow of "unauthorized content" on the Web, intellectual property used without payment or permission, represents perhaps the biggest threat to broadcasting and all other forms of content creation." He said, "If everything is free, there's no money to spend on content creation." Chiariglione responded with a defense of the "parasites," whom he said simply moved swiftly to where broadcasters were too slow to go. "Technology is there for people to invent, to exploit, to deploy something and use," he said. "If they [Google, etc.] have been successful, you have to blame yourselves." ABC-Australia's Pendleton offered an olive branch by noting that his company has developed ways to "use Google as a distribution platform, rather than a competitor or predator." Perhaps the last word, however, belonged to Michael Grade of ITV, whose defense of broadcast content was both emphatic and undisputed. "I absolutely believe that this business has a long-term future," as long as a British TV network can draw 12-15 million viewers to a prime-time show. "This is one of the few shared experiences that's left in a fragmented world," he said. All materials on this site Copyright (c) 2008 TechInsights, a Division of United Business Media LLC. All rights reserved. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.