Tag Archive for 'content providers'

Is the future of TV in doubt?

Published on January 31, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Today Sky announced its to launch a standalone TV service. This seems perfectly timed given that NetFlix has recently entered the UK market, joining Amazon’s LoveFilms and a rash of other services and platforms like Google’s YouTube, Apple.TV, and the BBC’s iPlayer.

All this reminded me of something I heard a while back at last years Broadcast Evolution Summit in Cannes – a very good event but notable for the complete absence of any internet “broadcast” companies and a large number of traditional TV executive who were showing very real signs that they didn’t really get what was about to happen to them.

At the Summit, it was pointed out that it took something like half-a-century before a car had stopped looking like horse-drawn carriage. Similarly, early TV’s often looked like some odd amalgam of sitting room furniture and a radiogram; it then took another generation to pass before colour was added; and another until HD was added.

But now TV has joined the internet; a medium that evolves in months a years rather than years and decades, and its notable that its the Internet pioneers that are making the early ground, not TV stalwarts.

I’ll give you an example. At the Summit there was lots of talk about linear and non-linear TV:

  • Linear is the way we watch broadcast TV, where there is a constant stream flowing past us and we have a simple binary choice to watch it or not.
  • Non-linear is recorded TV where we dip into a pool of content and choose what to watch and the order in which we watch it; this is what happens when we record stuff on our PVR, visit YouTube, drop by Mubi, install Boxee, go to Witney.TV or use the iPlayer catch-up services.

This list is long and that’s because just about all of the innovation is being made by non-linear companies and the distinction they are making with linear models is rapidly eroding.

At the Summit I reminded the audience that at a gigabit it was possible to download an HD movie in a lot less than 30-seconds. Puzzlement! Why do I care?

That’s less time than it takes to broadcast an ad – while you are watching the ad, your next HD programme will be streamed to your box; the choice of programming could be pre-booked by you or it could be carefully selected by a service that collects meta-data from your previous watching patterns, taking in Last.FM’s Love/Hate buttons, and your social media connections, linking you to your communities of interest.

Today the concept of “Spotify for HD TV” is well within grasp – Love Film has launched the first steps towards it, and with Amazon’s cloud infrastructure behind it it is only a matter of time (months rather than years).

Is this linear or non-linear? And who really cares? One thing is for certain,  TV executives shouldn’t!

Traditional media companies have highly skilled staff and are able to create top draw content within islands of trust backed by the very best creative labs; even if their brands may have to do battle with major global players like Apple and Google for platform space, their content should remain king. But this, in the medium term, will only remain a valuable asset if the linear mindset is put to bed.

I understand Google has set YouTube a strategic goal to increase viewing time from minutes to hours per day. This is why is so important to Google – unless the transmission medium is reliable they won’t be able to secure the rights to the very best content. If you were Disney would you sign away your content to a platform that regularly pixelates the most valuable asset attached to your brand?

I’ve written before about net neutrality and how ALA is about to deliver the tools that for innovative internet aware companies will remove the chance of pixelated content over pervasive and very fast networks so I won’t repeat myself here except to say that I’ve had far, far more interesting conversations about content delivery from internet companies who are beginning to get it, and far, far more puzzled or dismissive faces from traditional broadcast companies who don’t.

How long will it be before Google or Amazon try to secure premiership football rights? And who would bet against them?

For the time being at least it seems TV companies are playing catch-up. The speed of change is far, far quicker than anything they have experienced before, and they are being measured against companies who are comfortable working at that speed.

National legislation with global impacts

Published on January 19, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The blackout by many of the big names in response to proposed US legislation isn’t the first time law makers and pioneers have faced up to each other, and its also not the first time that national legislation, attempting to target a national issue, has had potentially significant impacts on the running of the international .

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the being posed by the US proposal for a domestic “Internet kill switch“; if the US Government were to switch off the US portions of the Internet it would not just deny UK citizens access to common services but may also kill entire portions of the UK’s internet access because of the global nature of internet peering.

There is no simple answer to this. Of course national Governments must act in their own self-interests but when it comes to the Internet the impact is seldom felt by local citizens alone. , thus far, has been largely successful in developing a fairly egalitarian, global phenomenon outside of national governance but we are entering a new world where national security, health and prosperity depend on the future running of the Internet – this makes it politically very important, not least to key knowledge economies like the UK.

US citizens have typically been more aware of this than many other nations – the importance of net-neutrality is a deeply emotional, heart-felt thing in the US but has so far been largely missed by UK citizens and is totally ignored in Ireland where the lack of transparency is actively marketed by the largest operator.

The reaction to the Internet blackout in response to the US proposals was interesting. It seemed to mark the awakening of debate beyond the US. I didn’t hear much from politicians outside of the US but the interest from commentators went beyond simply bemoaning that they couldn’t look things up on Wikipedia. When Jonathan Agnew from BBC’s Test Match Special comments about the importance of the internet and the problems that may introduce on Twitter, then it must have become mainstream.

My own position is that while copyright of course needs to be protected, the ramifications of any loosely drafted legislation can have far wider impacts, and the implementation of internet legislation specifically will always have implications far beyond national boundaries. Any Government considering a move like this today has a responsibility to world citizens and not just the self-interests of one sector of their local economy.

Today requires a generation of Internet-savvy politicians who can find new world solutions to old world problems like copyright.

Open is the best (only) policy – Ghost of Christmas Future

Published on December 17, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

In my last post (Open is the best (only) policy) I gave a high-level view on why I think open access networks are important today but I didn’t really explore why I think that offers just a narrow glimpse of why open access will become the single most important thing network operators can do for their customers, and why the UK is unknowingly paving the way.

So a bold statement:

I think that Active Line Access (ALA) will become one of the most important features of public networks in the years to come – but it will take a little time for that to become apparent. I also know that so far very few people have understood this.

When I talk to people who build public networks they typically see ALA as the necessary replacement to PPP/L2TP; that its the technical remedy that allows them to hand-off connections to ISPs in an world. They are of course right in a very practical, narrow sense but what the NICC did in codifying a long list of technical standards was much, much more than that.

When I talk to people who build campus networks their immediate response is what’s all the fuss about; ALA is a codified collection of standards that large corporates have been using for many years. Again broadly true but they have forgotten what their lives were like before they had these tools.

A Ghost of Christmas Past

Travelling back 15 years to the world of large corporates, a network managers lot was very difficult. They typically had the biggest budget in the IT department with the biggest sign-off but they also found it the hardest to provide direct empirical evidence that any incremental increase in their budget would deliver a greater incremental impact on the business; granular return on investment calculations were impossible.

Around this time I started to talk about the proximity to business, and it went like this:

  • The applications people had a direct relationship to the business so anything they did had a direct and immediate bearing on the business; incremental change could be measured and valued.
  • The core software people, like database administrators, were closely coupled to the applications people so although they were one step removed from the business and their systems may be shared, they were were close enough to the business they could measure their impact.
  • The server teams were further removed and incremental investment is beginning to become more challenging because their world is now two layers removed and increasingly shared but by working closely with the applications and core software people they could typically prove enough incremental value to justify additional investment.
  • The network teams were by definition universally shared and with no direct connection to parts of the business, only to the business as a whole; at this time, budget meetings in times of major shifts in the business were a pretty unpleasant affair and something most network managers dreaded (or at least the ones focussed on the business did)

With Y2K looming, I started to focus on how I could bridge the void and improve my proximity to the business. It was also at this time that what I then called 3D networks were beginning to be possible. Traditional 2D networks were a trade-off between distance and speed but 3D networks had a policy axis using a combination of VLANs and qualities of service; combining these meant I now had a granular control over the network and could therefore finely adapt the network in response to changing business needs – it was now possible to improve the network’s proximity to the business and therefore provide a direct and measurable impact. Budget meetings could now be constructive and less confrontational.

It took time for the ideas of 3D networking to take hold, and my name for it never stuck, but today any private network manager of any merit should be able to have a direct dialogue with the business.

When the NICC created ALA, they codified the tools that private network managers use; they put in place the mechanisms to improve the proximity of public networks to people and businesses – and the impact of that will, in time, be far more profound.

A Ghost of Christmas Future

It often takes a single event to focus minds and create the conditions for a shift of this kind:

  • For private network managers it was Y2K, when vast sums were spent renovating application platforms and they needed to justify their budgets.
  • For public networks it will be the shift to NGA network we’re just beginning.

So when I talk about Service Providers I’m not being lazy and omitting “” because I assume they’ re synonymous;  its because I think ISPs are in reality a general-purpose subset of Service Providers – that once “providers of service” become aware of what the NICC has done the service provider market will become a whole lot richer and more exciting.

I had hoped the NHS might have been the pioneer in this space – the confluence of PSNs and the emergence of NGA is an opportunity that should be grabbed with both hands – but I suspect it will take a major commercial company to make the first move.

Who might the early movers be? The major companies and content delivery networks (CDNs) are the obvious choices, and who better than Google (with YouTube) and Amazon Web Services (with Love Films).

Imagine this:

Today Google offer a best endeavours YouTube service, over the top of other people’s transit networks; it works okay if your goal is to support three minutes of viewing per day but isn’t good enough for three hours per day. This is at the root of Google’s concerns over Net-Neutrality.

In response, Google launch a Premium YouTube service for a few pounds month but instead of routing the service via an IP-based BGP interface onto your ISP’s network, its routed via an ALA VLAN hand-over point to your network operator. Quality is assured so now you can watch three-hours a day of broadcast quality media, and Google can secure the rights to premium content as the risk of pixelation has been removed and the rights holders can feel confident their brand wont be damaged.

Love Films backed by an ALA-based “Networks as a Service” offering from Amazon Web Services is at least as well placed to be the pioneer, completely demolishing the current rigid assumption that viewing is either linear (broadcast) or non-linear (on-demand); their new streaming package that learns your viewing habits is the first baby step.

Today, this minute, this is a dream – a perfectly feasible dream – but as companies like Love Films evolve their services and they explore, prod and push the capabilities and limitations of the underlying networks then I’m as confident as I can be that it will become a reality. When (not if) an organisation like Amazon Web Services gets their heads around the capabilities of ALA the world will change and imaginations will be unleashed.

Today we have a world of Over the Top (OTT) services – prepare for a world that combines OTT with RTS (round the side) services – and prepare for a future that blows your mind.

If you build your networks without ALA in mind then you are about to condemn your platform to obsolescence and your customers to boredom!

Start developing your networks with a proximity to your customers in mind and you will never look back!

Open is the best (only) policy

Published on December 12, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

If I’m honest I’m a little tired of the whole open network debate – largely because I don’t think there is very much to debate.

It seems very odd to me that people who are happy to argue that their own networks should be closed and vertically integrated are often well informed about the European open access models and the US debates – that these great debates are basic human right but that they somehow don’t apply to their networks but should to everyone else’s.

Until recently it was certainly true that all but the very largest networks had little choice but to deliver their own services – but that was a market imperfection rather than a point of principle or commercial choice. That market flaw is easing – far from fixed but progress is being made – and it is no longer a necessity to restrict service choice.

I’ll accept that the very largest service providers are still unlikely to bite your arm off for anything less than a few tens of thousands of customers but there is a very large world of choice between no service providers and offering each and every service provider. Many of the smaller ISPs are happy to engage in local broadband projects, especially if they themselves are local – and what’s more they may be better attuned to providing a bespoke service to your new customers than many of the very biggest providers.

So why should networks be open?

  • People like choice – it may not be the number 1 factor for everyone but it is very important and will be in the top thee for most people. With take-up being the top success factor, its simply not worth putting an impediment in your way.
  • Encouraging service competition is likely to generate more exciting, innovative services. As the capabilities of NGA networks, and more especially ALA,  become understood by the market service innovation will be more exciting than anything we’ve seen so far  but it will miss any networks not geared to delivering variety.
  • If you need support from public funds then you have no choice; EU and UK law insists on open access wholesale networks. Shooting the messenger doesn’t change the law, so frankly if you have a hole in your investment case open up and you might find public funds are available to help.
  • Without wholesale services, you’re footprint is deemed “NGA White” and the State reserves the right to intervene with public funds. It may not be likely and you may have a case to challenge publicly subsidised competition but by the time the law rules you will probably be no more – its not a fight worth fighting.
  • And finally I fully expect Ofcom to rule within the life of your investment that networks are a natural monopoly and may either force you to offer a wholesale service or impose challenging regulations on you.

Or to summarise – there are no good reasons to have a closed network and a good many to be open – its not a fight worth defending.

An observation on British broadband #2

Published on May 22, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

One of my long-term predictions has been that Service Providers will ultimately disappear as we know them today.

They were a necessary middle-man when we were trying coax our voice-grade network into the internet-era; dial-up internet evolved from banks of modems providing access to bulletin boards and mail hosts to an interconnected inter-net.

Now we are moving towards a network purpose designed for data that treats voice as just another service, there is something of an assumption that ISPs as we have come to know them will remain an important part of the supply chain – the necessary link between retail customers and the telecommunications core.

We can see that evidenced in the EU’s assumption that open access networks will provide multiple layers of competition, and the initial focus of Ofcom’s work began with a replacement for level 2 services which form the basis of today’s ISP services (in fact it doesn’t feel like they’ve moved much beyond level 2 access).

But its worth remembering what happened in the UK when the regulator mandated access to the first-mile copper network, the so called local loop; ISPs rushed to compete at an infrastructure level, not on a virtualised network but using  real networks. It suggests the industries preferred competitive battle-ground and the regulators may not be exactly the same.

In the days of dial-up modems, your ISP provided transit from their network to the internet, your email address and web-space. Today, most people prefer Gmail and consider Facebook their web hosts, leaving ISP’s as little more than resellers of internet transit. No wonder they seeks areas to differentiate!

Returning to today’s next generation transition, there has been a clear reluctance among ISPs to engage and commit to next generation developments. While much of the debate has been on the cost and complexity of creating new software interfaces to manage layer 2 Active Line Access (ALA – what BT calls GEA) services, lying behind this , I suspect, is a deeper preference to find a realistic substitute for local loop unbundling, where ISPs can retain their ability to compete using physical and not virtual networks.

If this is true, then perhaps it should not have been a surprise that the first formal, unequivocal request from a service provider to next generation network builders was for physical network access – Virgin’s offer to use a wavelength to extend their cable coverage to new areas where a full -to-the-premises network exists.

Physical network control provides greater scope to form the service layer in your own image – to differentiate the customer experience, matching it your brand and aims.

While the arguments from the rest of the service provider community for not joining the next generation party have focussed on the complexity of software system interconnection, this is really a facet of the cost and complexity of administering virtual networks – physical network interconnection is typically a much simpler process with fewer variables.

So was the work on ALA a waste?

Absolutely and unequivocally no!

A smart and flexible layer 2 framework is what will release the – the operators. While service providers appear to want to move down the network stack, their place will be filled by application and . The capabilities of a smart will unleash the creativity of social media companies, cloud application developers and the content delivery companies.

ALA should be promoted to Sony and Google as much, if more than, to TalkTalk and Plusnet.

Am I bothered that some next generation networks appear vertically integrated? If their intentions are monopolistic, then very much so. If however, they are creating a platform for services and using ALA to actively encourage new service delivery models, then I’m less concerned – in many ways I suspect they will become the pioneers of a new internet era.

So what is the impact of all this?

If internet service provision does move further towards physical network provisioning, then we need to understand one key message: Who ever lights the service owns the customers and controls their access to the digital world. This is the true root of the debate.

While it is true that whoever builds the passive cabling has a natural geographical monopoly, whoever lights the service has a natural monopoly over people and businesses. That is one of the key strengths of ALA – it breaks the chains, putting control over the digital experience in the hands of customers and the services they value.

In this regard, it perhaps matters less about having a choice over who lights the service but much more important about how they light it. Getting this right will move the internet message away from bits and bytes and towards stuff that matters to us – the services we value.

So for Ofcom, two messages should be very clear:

  1. More progress needs to be made on passive infrastructure access. Its not just about ducts and polls but a passive version of ALA – a consistent framework that allows today’s ISPs to unbundle cables and reinforce their apparent desire to deliver real networks, not virtual.
  2. ALA is a brilliant mechanism but only if its purpose and opportunities are made clear. Whoever lights the cables, should be using ALA, and a new level of service competition should be created where multiple content providers are able to take advantage of the intelligence built into ALA. Ofcom needs to put its long arms around the totality of its remit, and not treat broadband and different in some way to TV or content.

If we can get this right, the UK could become the first country to break the chains of the net neutrality debate and in the process create an exciting platform for the next wave of creative industries and social media. And we will have put to bed one of the key reasons the major ISPs aren’t fully engaging with this future.

Broadcast Evolution

Published on January 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I’ve just come back from the Broadcast Evolution Summit, a three-day conference exploring how the world of TV and broadcasting is changing, where I was given an opportunity to present some ideas on how the changes in next generation broadband infrastructures will create new opportunities and for . Its impossible to turn down an opportunity to speak at a conference if its in Cannes and just as you’re getting over the winter blues, but this was a very good event.

One of the most striking things which really ought to have crossed my mind before was that the broadcast and industries are such different beasts, and at times it felt a little like we were looking at each other through some distorting lens, each with perfectly rational views of each other but very slightly wrong in important ways. So this conference was the first opportunity I’d had to meet, listen and chew over the challenges and changes the is facing, and fascinating it was. I plan to start a mini-series of blog entries about some of the speakers and impacts they’ve had on my thinking, and some of the ideas which came from listening to an industry undergoing change.

One thing was clear though, that this industry is facing many of the same pressures the is facing – new technologies and ways of consuming media disrupting the ordered and well established way of doing things. However, there was much less of the Fergal Sharkey position, resisting change and arguing others should prop up their way of life, and much more of the Billy Bragg world view that people will still want to watch quality content, albeit in very different ways, and that although they haven’t got all the answers just yet there is a willingness to collaborate and learn so their industry has a long and successful future.

As I collect my thoughts – and there were lots – the first is that this kind of event, where two industries get to explore their similarities and opportunities, is a welcome addition to the European conference circuit. If there were a music industry version of it I’d be there like a shot!

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