Of Guides, Graphics, and Quality
Colin Dixon, Practice Manager, IP Media
September 14, 2007
Amsterdam was the focus of the European media technology world this weekend with vendors, operators, and content providers crowding the 12 halls of exhibitors at IBC 2007. This distinctly European show is one of my favorites since I find it much easier than, say, CES or NAB to navigate. I also can spend more quality time with the exhibitors, a big plus. With the vast range of products covered at the show, here are three of the things that really caught my eye.
Takeaway 1: ORCA, the IPTV middleware company, was there with guns blazing declaring "the EPG is dead" and to be replaced by ORCA's new guide, Compass. What differentiates Compass from other EPGs is the use of User Generated Content (UGC), advanced search, and social networking to help viewers break through (that is, sensibly and easily navigate) the mountain of video content now available. As readers of TDG's Program Guides at the Crossroads: The IPG Gets Personal from 2005 will recall, I identified these same three issues amongst the most critical components of what I termed the "PEG" or "Personal Entertainment Guide."
When a viewer is looking for something to watch, rather than giving them a straight grid, Compass combines search with preferences to create a list of content that is most relevant to the viewer. If these suggestions don't work, a click of button brings up several more. With viewers increasingly watching PVR and VOD content, this is a welcome break from the gridtype lists provided by today's PayTV operator guides. But what really caught my eye was the use of social networking in the "Where is Everybody" feature. Using this feature, you can tell your friends what you're currently watching and, at the click of a button, see what they're watching as well. True, it may be premature to declare the death of traditional TV, but this type of feature redefines the entire notion of social TV viewing (that is, viewing with others regardless of whether they are physically in the same room).
Takeaway 2: There was much discussion of QoS (Quality of Service) and QoE (Quality of Experience) at IBC (forgive the perpetual acronyms). Despite this larger theme, there was little substance to the discussion in terms of real products which operators can deploy today. There was, however, a tiny booth in the IPTV area in which Digital Fountain was quietly demonstrating a new approach to Forward Error Correction (FEC) that doesn't penalize the whole network in order to correct errors in just a small area. Forward Error Correction can do a wonderful job of correcting packet loss problems across a telco's IPTV network. With picture problems visible to the viewer at less than 1% packet loss, FEC can maintain the picture with packet loss at 5% or more. The penalty paid for this performance is available bandwidth, as error correcting packets are transmitted along with the original source stream.
With DigitalFountain's ToughStream (apparently FEC wasn't a sexy enough term!) and its new partnership with Neptuny, the error corrected packets can be separated from the core video stream and sent on a separate IP socket. Further, these packets can be directed to specific, troublesome areas of the network without reducing bandwidth to the rest of network. With picture quality among the key reasons for customer dissatisfaction, this solution could help deliver better QoS resulting in improved QoE. And that, in turn, can help reduce that bugaboo of all PayTV operators, churn.
Takeaway 3: Another company full of surprises at this year's show was Osmosys. Known for its standards-based approach to middleware, the last thing I expected to find at its booth was flashy graphical interfaces. But, sure enough, those engineers so adept at coding abstraction layers and driver software can also turn their hand to teasing out decent graphics performance from the ST7109 SoC-based IPTV set-top box. Menu items swept into view and Picture-in-Picture (PiP) displays twisted and turned into place. There were also some very cool pseudo-3D rotating cubes and bouncing balls (obligatory). Although much of this seemed to have little real value as an interface, it certainly served to show that the total lack of animation and innovation in guides and menus is not fault of the underlying hardware. So if you're looking to add a little snap and whiz to your interface, perhaps a conversation with Osmosys is in order.
This is one of Colin Dixon's Opinions on his recent IBC 2007 trip. Read his other Opinions:
IBC-1:Trapped in IPTV Land
IBC-3:Afterthoughts and Reflections
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