Interview; An evolution in User Interfaces for IPTV service providers?

Service providers are already using multiple interfaces to target certain segments within their audience, and the migration of the technology focused grid based EPG to allow customisation, create intelligent viewing and a future migration path to new services may well prove vital in reducing customer churn, and developing a more personalised TV viewing experience. Stephen Reeder, from Ant offers his views on how these changes will effect the industry.

What have been the key trends in the last year?

Generally, despite all of the discussion and interest in IPTV, this year the industry has been on hold. Telcos who were about to deploy IPTV have been waiting to see what is happening with technology vendors in the space, resulting in the whole industry stopping to wait and see. In the last few months we have started to see many of the Telcos recommence trials and deployments using the tried and trusted solutions that the tier two Telcos have successfully utilized. They are quickly realizing that they cannot wait indefinitely without missing the market opportunity. This new surge in activity means that ANT is starting to close software licenses at a healthy rate now. It is a great sign for the market.

What the customer wants now is an IPTV service with a great look and feel, simple navigation and a richer set of capabilities. Operators on the other hand want to attract and retain customers while delivering valuable services that generate additional revenues. Both sides depend on the client software capabilities to deliver, which is reflected in where the market is going.

Is there much differentiation in terms of navigation?

Most of today's solutions look similar. This is typically not what operators deploying a service want, but it is what many of the technology-lead services supply. For example, the familiar grid-based Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) really only tells you what is on now and next for a small set of channels. Outside of this it starts to fail. It is less successful for large channel sets or for planning what to watch in the future and is not the best way of programming one’s PVR. Everybody is using a grid EPG because it is a technology solution to a technology generated problem. So what you will see over the next year is very much a move towards "what’s on now", "planning my viewing", "personalized channels", "recommendations based on my viewing history and habits", "popular suggestions", "peer recommendations" and other ways to effectively search and filter through the growing set of live and archived programmes.

None of this is complex backend technology. These are all, in fact, user interface issues that can be solved in standard ways using client software platforms like ANT Galio. I think we will see a user interface evolution over the next year.

How important is personalisation and a compelling user interface in terms of customer satisfaction and reducing churn?

It’s a vital component. For example, France Telecom already has two user interfaces - one of the youth audience and one for the adult audience. For the kids the user interface is all wacky graphics and bouncy stuff and for the adults it is less cluttered and gets straight to what you want to view. This type of personalisation helps engage the consumer, giving a feeling of ownership that ultimately helps reduce churn. We are at the very beginning of where personalisation can take us.

Transitioning between Standard and High definition viewing further opens this opportunity with more screen space. However, it also introduces an extra level of complexity where the look and feel or capabilities of applications need to transition from standard to high definition without expensive re-writes.

ANT has anticipated many of these trends through detailed involvement with leading global deployments over the years. We provide standard ways for addressing these issues that allow services to be delivered to a range of screen sizes and types in a cost effective and commercially viable way. Our solutions support cascading style sheets and have knowledge of the media properties from the box. This allows a Telco to design a service with simple standard and high definition "skins" that apply to the one single application sent down to the box. If the box is high definition, the consumer gets the high resolution look and feel to match the high definition video content. These styles/skins can affect screen layout, graphic design, navigation behaviour and so on - it's not just colours and background images. In fact you can use this approach to provide white-label services that can be rebranded into different homes. It is also possible to deliver sponsored or co-branded applications as a revenue opportunity. Perhaps today's EPG is sponsored by Coca Cola?

Future migration of the EPG, how will this work with future services that IPTV providers deploy?

One thing to consider is that IPTV comes closely tied with the broadband connection into the home - the IP box depends on ADSL to function. Naturally this gives the Telco an interesting economy of scale compared to non-IP based triple play offerings where multiple lines into the home are required. An interesting factor for ANT is that this ultimately means the IP set-top box is on the same network as the PC making simple home networking an inevitable side effect. Thus it is really easy for a consumer to buy an IPTV based set-top box or PVR and gain significant home networking and personal media benefits without the need for residential home gateways or media adapters. The set-top box and ultimately the TV will be equally at home showing the family vacation photos as showing the latest episode of Lost. The key to this home network is about devices communicating with each other using Internet protocols, providing an ever increasing quality of home entertainment without the requirement to buy a prohibitively expensive box. So an EPG will migrate into a media location service that allows easy access to both local personal media stored on PCs and devices on the home network as well as remote subscription-based media delivered as part of the IPTV service. Plus I'm sure that this unified media solution will in itself cause mixed media service innovation.