Interview with Huw Price-Stephens, Director of Marketing & Strategic Business Development, Amino

ipTVnews caught up with Huw Price-Stephens at the IPTV World Forum 2007 in March to talk about the past, present and future of the IPTV market.

How has the IPTV market emerged over the last few years?
I have been working in IPTV for 12 years now, so right back really at the start of what was some of the early trials of VoD and it has emerged into what we think about now as IPTV. It is all pretty much the same ideas about extending/expanding the TV proposition for people and ‘what more can I do with my TV’ is the basic proposition. Now, over the intervening years, the whole market has gone through cycles of people trying to understand what the costs are, what the business model is, what the network capacities would be and basically we’ve seen very steady, slow growth if you go back all that way. When it came to 2000 we saw an increase in activity, but it is still not massive if you think about it, there is a small number of million people out there consuming these services and with billions of people out there watching TV, it is still a bit of a minority.

How fast is IPTV taking off?
The people who are enthusiastic about how rapidly IPTV is going to take off, I think are being a little bit naive because it is not actually going to go through some massive acceleration. If you look back at the trends and the way IPTV has evolved, it would be quite remarkable if it suddenly did that, I think it will gradually increase and I think it is going to take a while.

Why do you believe the process will be slow?
Part if the reason is that people are still trying to understand how to make the proposition work for consumers. We have got transitions taking place, the move from standard definition to high definition TV has caused a lot of would-be IPTV providers to believe that if they just hang on a bit longer, HD technology will be coming out, so they don’t want to buy SD now and find the world moves to HD, and all the money they have spent is wasted. Secondly, we have got this technology move from MPEG-2 to MPEG 4 (H.264), which allows us to approximately half the amount of band width we need to carry a video signal into the home, so you where you used to carry one channel of information to the TV, now with H.264, you are able to carry two. So again, for the last, 12, 18, 24 months people who are seen to move forward in IPTV have been a little hesitant to make all their investments in MPEG4. Therefore for the last two years or so, the industry has been held back a little bit by people anticipating the shift in technology to HD and H.264.

In many cases, it is not that people want to use those technologies today, they want to make sure that when they buy particularly the equipment they put in people’s homes, that it is not going to be obsolete by next year, due to some sort of change in technology.

How will the future shape up for IPTV?
There is a good chance that things are going to increase slightly more rapidly because we are now bringing to the market these new technologies, which offer people more advanced services.
We are now at a point where we have service providers, who want to push ahead with this, but are still not absolutely confident on how to make the decision; what are the right decisions that will lead to success. So when they engage with technology providers, there is an advantage if you can demonstrate that you have a good track record, a good history and be able to demonstrate that they are thinking about where this is all leading. Amino thinks about this in terms of the design of the product, they way they look externally, we think about it also on the way we embed technology. Effectively, we use the technology which is the most standard technology from the web in our products. The reason for that is, when we first started thinking about what IPTV was, we were thinking about what else could be done with the television that we might be able to make money out of, how the service offering could be expanded and whether there was a way that the technology from the internet can be relevant in driving, improving and enhancing the TV experience. In the last two years, that view of IPTV has changed for us as a company, I don’t think it has changed for the industry as a whole, but for us it has changed because of the explosion of the web, the explosion of broadband connection, which suddenly allows people to consume video or audio, high value content via the PC, from the web and some of that content highlighting the need to be on the mobile phone and the PVA, we are now starting to think about a world in which we have all these devices, which we might need for entertainment of information, we have new sources of content, there are a number of different places we can get interesting content. And so consumers’ mindset of how they engage with the world is changing: any content, any device, anytime, anywhere is what we are coming to.

We must not forget the TV in all this. The TV is essential to most consumers and has a very special place in people’s homes because it is the dominant device for entertainment, where people relax, where they get their music and their information. Although the web is there and we use it increasingly, we still love TV and we love what we get from it. In this new world, it is no longer a question of what more I can do with my TV, it is how we ensure that the TV can keep this central world in the consumer’s life even as all these other things are changing around it. They way in which we can do that is to make sure that all this other ‘stuff’ can also be delivered via the TV, because that would be the device of choice for a lot people’s interaction.