There’s nothing like a good dance to get the ol’ juices stirred up. After watching the sidestepping and all-in-one line dancing that went on last week in Los Angeles at the Cable Show, I’d have to say the whole industry’s juices are flowing.
Cable engineers came out and said that they like the idea of IP transport. They’re in favor of IP video. But they stopped short of talking about IPTV. I’ve heard that part of this is just a stubborn refusal to give telcos like AT&T credit for anything. If they want to call their stuff IPTV then dammit we’ll just call ours IP video.
That required cable techs to do a boogaloo down Convention Way between IP video and IPTV while stepping lively between the two definitions. To my way of thinking, IP video is not quite up to snuff with IPTV which is professionally produced content delivered to the television set. IP video can be anything from your neighbor’s dog performing on YouTube to an oldies TV show on Hulu to last week’s episode of Justified. It’s all video; it’s all delivered over IP; but it’s not all TV.
I bring up the distinction because the folks at The Cable Show made it clear that they consider it important to differentiate between the two. Cable may or may not adopt IPTV—and it probably will, no matter what the industry says publicly—but last week’s show confirmed what I’ve known all along. IP video is an important element in the future of a cable MSO’s subscriber fare.
This is good news for ActiveVideo because it proves we’ve always been dancing to the right beat. You may have seen us at the show (this is my space so I’ll do commercials if I like); in fact, if you were there, you couldn’t have missed us. Our point was that IP is the transport media of record and that the cloud is the best place to store the interactive IP content that will rain down on subscribers.
The point that needs to be made—again and again and again—is that there’s too much content to store on site. The old model of the fat cable box is giving up to the thin client—or at least it is when it comes to interactivity. There might be benefits to keeping some TV shows—whether IPTV shows or not—on a DVR, but when it comes to the range of entertainment, knowledge and generally fun stuff associated with IPTV, there’s nothing like that big amorphous cloud in the sky to hold it until it’s needed.
So whether we’re looking at IP video, no matter how well or poorly produced; IPTV or any other definition of content, if it’s interactive, it’s IP and if it’s IP it should be stored in the cloud. Doesn’t matter what you call it.
