IPTV providers are beginning to consider iTV technologies to help them provide compelling services. Steven Hawley looks at the catalysts for adoption, including application and content development standards

Basic interactivity

So far, most IPTV environments limit interactivity to the basics: using IPTV’s two-way connection to invoke the programme guide, to change channels, rent a video or to enter and navigate a Web-on-TV portal. True iTV extends this two-way communication into the content itself, including live events, recorded programmes and advertising. How will iTV address the service provider’s need to offer a differentiated TV experience, and what are the opportunities? First, iTV is expected to help service providers move away from the traditional broadcast model, toward the fully on-demand environment that the Web has trained consumers to demand. Second, it will help service providers deal with content production and usability challenges. With iTV, a context can surround the content and, if effectively designed, consumers appreciate the depth that it provides.

Red button

 A hallmark of iTV is the ‘red button’, located on the TV remote control, used as the entry point to interactivity in TV programming. It has also become a metaphor for TV interactivity in general. The fact that it is just one button hints at how effective it can be, but it also draws attention to the human factors and design challenges. The red button is already in widespread use by TV providers in the UK and a number of other countries. “BSkyB has been successful because they have trained people to use the red button,” says John Allen, CEO of Digisoft.tv, a provider of iTV applications development tools.

“It’s a service which uses interactivity during sports matches to display statistics and different views of the game.” This level of functionality goes well beyond the ‘iTV’ functionality in today’s IPTV systems, and yet “most subscribers don’t notice that it is different from the linear TV experience; it’s just natural.” ]Mr. Allen adds that BSkyB didn’t initially set out to reinvent TV; they added interactivity to help subscribers get to related information and enrich the experience, “and viewers do notice when it’s missing.”

Another important factor will be familiarity. PVR and VOD succeed because they update the familiar VCR metaphor, which in turn was an adaptation of the audio tape recorder user experience. The aforementioned sports match example succeeds because consumers know how to use hyperlinks on the Web.

If service and programme providers are to succeed in addressing the basic revenue and customer loyalty goals, they must be willing to experiment, and iTV gives them opportunities to do so that are not possible in a linear TV world. Shari Glusker, director of media services at Microsoft TV notes that “IPTV and iTV are both very young technologies. Nobody is yet sure what the compelling experiences will be.” This point is amplified by Jeff Van Cura, senior director of strategic solutions development for Alcatel, who presents the issue in technical terms: “How can IP packets be treated consistently while carriers continually roll out services to see which ones might be adopted?” This situation also argues for the need to move quickly. “If carriers must go through nine-month cycles of trialling and testing for each and every iTV application, they will never figure out the magic formula,” adds Ms. Glusker.

For iTV/IPTV providers to experiment and iterate quickly, several things need to occur. For one, programmers and service providers will begin to demand a reasonably consistent and universal way to deploy interactive services and to develop interactive content. This is an argument for iTV technical standards that go beyond basic stream encoding. Furthermore, nobody wants to be locked into single-vendor dependencies. Whatever iTV standards might arise for IPTV, they also must recognise that other interactive environments have come before it.

“Technology providers will have to leverage standards from elsewhere to accommodate interactive content developed for cable or satellite, so content providers and advertisers can get the most return from the same content,” says Mr. Van Cura. These standards include the cable industry’s OpenCable Applications Platform (OCAP), the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) used for mobile phone, PDA and industrial automation, Microsoft’s .NET used for Microsoft TV and Windows PCs, the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) from the DVB, and the emerging BluRay DVD platform, each targeted at different but overlapping types of consumer platforms and network providers.

Predictable environment

Standards, and development tools that produce content that abides to those standards, will provide iTV developers with a predictable development environment. It also presents IPTV technology providers, such as set-top box vendors, with a way to lower the costs of their technologies because there would be fewer environments to support. And service providers will benefit from tools that allow them to experiment with new applications quickly.

Hans Wald, director of advanced applications for Myrio, a Siemens company, puts it this way: “Until now, IPTV standards have tended to be at a low level, to make hardware work together. The current challenge is to come up with a standardised tool set that allows providers to port applications and content across multiple consumer platforms, including IPTV, while respecting the lowest common denominator.” Adds Ms. Glusker: “How can someone invent the IPTV equivalent of eBay unless you have the flexibility to take risks?”