IBC MPEGIF Master Class review by Christophe Lenaerts

At the first day of conferences at IBC 2007 I was invited to attend as a panelist in the third session: New Video Applications & Services.

After a nice keynote of Thomas Staneker - Senior Executive VP IPTV, T-Com talking about T-Com's new IDTV and web streaming services (no sales pitches please) we all could have a few minutes to tell what we thought about the subject. Unfortunately some panelists didn't get the "no sales pitches please" email from the organisers. But all in all we had a very clear view of how the world of video should run and how it isn't running regardless of what the industry promised in the early years 2000.

The panel:

Moderator Sebastian Moeritz - Pesident, MPEGIF/CEO dicas

Speakers Thomas Staneker - Senior Executive VP IPTV, T-Com
Christopher Lenaerts - CEO, Telemak
Bob Giddy - CEO, Amino
Ivan Verbesselt - Senior VP, Head of Strategic Marketing, Nagravision
Tassilo Raesig - Head Content Navigation Services, Business Development, Sony
Gianpaolo Balboni - Senior Program Manager TV and Multimedia, Telecom Italia
David Trescot - Vice President Rhozet Business Unit Harmonic Inc

Web 2.0 vs Television 2.0

What I heard from the panel where all on how to get the ISP's and mobile operators a critical mass to launch IDTV, IPTV, Mobile TV etc. What I didn't hear enough is how the industry thinks to do that. From the ISP and Telco you hear how they will launch another nice channel to keep their customers at hand. And from the content owners (Hollywood) you hear that they will launch an independent platform because they don't want to get linked to the telco.

A question from the public asked to the telcos on how to reach the critical mass to pay for those services was answered that it didn't matter if there was demand, but only that the technology was there and needed to be put to market. I think that is wrong. If you look at the success of Google and Yahoo and Amazon en Ebay it is not because they maunched a dedicated closed service on a telco's network, but because their critical market is the entire world connected the the world wide web. They reach millions of customers every day across the telcos and ISPs and mobile operators. And I'm sure of one thing, the CEO's and CFO's of those telcos are jealous of the success of Google and co. They are looking to ways to join the hype. Even Apple understood that they needed too keep away from building their own network, but to use the largest communication channel ever: the web. Using content from all the majors in the US and Europe and Asia, they offer through iTunes a single platform where people can listen, buy, subscribe, watch download and aggregate content. The next phase should be to make a platform, OS, browser, software, hardware, IPS, telco and mobile independent content delivery tool. The company that succeeds in doing that and launch it cross border will be the next Google. Or is Google already doing that?

Conclusions:

My perspective is that Web 2.0 and Television 2.0 will be the catch line of IBC 2008. Next year I suspect to see companies such as Google, Youtube, Daily Motion and Yahoo be present at IBC. And actually, Google already is present with Adsense audio. Or maybe will they be at NAB 2008?