Motive Interview: Is the consumer environment for IPTV merging into a "perfect storm?"

In this interview the Senior Manager of Industry Marketing at Motive, Ben Geller, puts forward his views on the challenges facing telcos in developing effective IPTV services, and suggests that a near future combination of factors would create the "perfect storm" for IPTV to flourish.

What’s Motive’s position with IPTV providers at the moment?

We are definitely in the early days in terms of putting our product out to market. We have one company with whom we are actively deploying, and we will go public with that information soon.

How did you approach the IPTV market?

 We’ve been looking at the IPTV market for around 18 -24 months. I started by going out and talking with the large cable operators in North America and Europe. I interviewed about a half a dozen of them get their perspective on what it was taking operationally to actually support and manage their digital videos services. I thought that they would be a good benchmark, because of the fact that cable in general has been delivering video services for forty or fifty years. And on the digital side, they had product in commercial market since the late 1990s.

 So we walked in there knowing that product was out in the commercial marketplace, that networks had been stabilised and that that everything was working in a business environment. The type of metrics we collected were things like the number of calls that were placed to the helpdesk, the amount of time that it takes to get those calls answered and dealt with, the number of technician dispatches required to solve issues that could not be addressed in the call centre.

Our perception was that those type of metrics should be levelling out over time, that those would be the things that you get good at delivering, and trends would be levelling out. What we actually found was the complete opposite. So more calls were coming in to the centre, those calls were taking longer to resolve and technicians were dispatched to solve the problems in the home. More and more time was spent at the helpdesk. We noticed a number of things, significantly how much more complicated things were getting with the set top box. In the analogue world it was a decoder and it did that job really well. In the digital world, it has a complex operating system and runtime applications. That type of complex technology doesn’t always work well in the hands of a novice consumer in the home.

We found that once consumers had problems, their one recourse was to pick up the telephone. And once they got put through to that help desk operator, that operator had no view whatsoever of what was going on in the home. The consumer had to be their eyes and ears.