Telcos are selling IPTV with traditional marketing messages about choice and control, but they want to differentiate themselves by giving users a personal ID and access to stored content from wherever they are

Individual services

As more Tier-1 carriers outline their vision, it is becoming clear that they want to pitch services at individuals, rather than just homes, and put each consumer at the centre of their own video universe. Each subscriber, adult or child, will be given their own identity on the network, and their view of the network and services will be determined by their personal profile. So as they log into the IPTV service, they see the user guide they customised, the content they stored and - most likely - their own VoIP telephone log and messages. In the midst of deployments, telcos are focused today on benchmark video services like broadcast TV and VOD and their marketing is built around the world consumers already understand. Thus the benefits of digital (better pictures and more choice) or movies-on-demand are the core marketing themes. And how would any but the most tech-savvy consumer cope with the vision that Cisco has been evangelising, where each user has a unique ID that goes with them across networks and devices, and determines their relationship with those networks, and the content they access? Yet, for Cisco and others, the future of IPTV is all about interactivity, personalisation, mobility and location awareness, driven by an ability to differentiate service types and manage Quality of Service.

Remote programming

Luc Heripret, multimedia senior consultant at Sofrecom, France Telecom’s consultancy division, told a conference in London recently that the French telco would deploy PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) next year for its MaLigne TV service that can be programmed remotely via the Internet or a mobile phone. And with a stated commitment to network PVR as well (content stored on network servers), he outlined a vision that, in time, the actual content stored by consumers could also be manipulated from outside the home. Thus IPTV subscribers could request that programmes they asked to be recorded are streamed to their mobile phone over a 3G connection. Once again, the ambition is to focus on the individual and put them, and their personal content, at the centre of a potentially network-agnostic experience.

Orri Hauksson, VP for research and business development at Iceland Telecom, whose Simmin IPTV service launched in November 2004, says customers should be given a ‘Lifelog’: personal room on the network where they can store not just some, but all their personal digital photos. These are then accessible from the PC, television and even mobile phone. “Your services make sense to the customer as a holistic experience,” he comments.

Hugo Suidman, senior marketing manager at KPN, which is scheduled to roll out video-over-DSL services in Q2, has put an emphasis on personalising the way content is brought into the home. He suggests television “should be more integrated with your personality in the same way that mobile phones are part of your personality. In ten years broadcasting will become single-casting and we will reach ‘Me-TV’.” Martin Cullum, general manager for technology development, video networks at Bell Canada (which is trialling video-over-DSL in Toronto) adds: “When you turn on the television you should have your own homepage that includes traffic cameras showing your route to work, the local weather and the soccer scores from the previous night.”

This personalisation of TV reaches its pinnacle with usergenerated content, something KPN believes can set telecoms operators apart. “We are already experimenting with this,” Suidman reveals. “I don’t know if you have to be a professional television maker to have a good story. This is an Internet concept and the person making the content wants their work to be spread and used. For the people making the content, they are going to be very attached to their service.”