I had lunch recently with an old friend – OK, he’s not old so let’s call him a longtime friend – who asked me how frequently I updated my blog. I told him that I try to have something fresh each day.
Sure it’s a challenge – on a couple fronts.
First, as I have written before, I don’t want to digress into boring you with pictures of my vacation, birthdays, etc. – unless, of course, I can develop a logical tie-in to telecommunications trends. In that case, watch out!
Secondly, I want to provide some inspirational thoughts – not simply a news item – but something that will lead you to write me, call me, challenge me, or maybe even engage me.
Let’s continue from my thoughts yesterday on YouTube and take a look at IP-TV. I am concerned that IP-TV, as a straight broadcast medium over twisted pair, is just not going to work in North America. There needs to be a better way for telcos to play.
We North Americans love our TVs. We have TVs in the family room, in the kitchen, in our bedrooms. During the World Cup this summer, we had TVs running in every bar, in many banks, in office food courts.
What we saw from the World Cup was the power of High Definition. With retail prices for HD equipment falling and the amount of HD content increasing, more homes will have HD sets, and many will have multiple HD devices, watching different HD shows at the same time.
And therein is one of the problems for the telcos’ IP-TV plans.
It is tough enough to upgrade the access plant to distribute one HD signal down those skinny little wires. Multiple HD channels may be beyond the capability of twisted pair until too late in the development and deployment cycle. As a result, Verizon is spending $20B to run fibre-to-the-home for 16M subscribers. $1250 per sub.
That is a brute force way to fight off the converged communications portfolio of cable. It is certainly one approach: replace the entire access infrastructure.
There is another way. Change the rules of the game. Think of Captain Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Faced with an no-win scenario in the Star Fleet academy, then cadet James Kirk found a way around the test by reprogramming the simulation, thus changing the conditions of the contest. In doing so, Kirk defeated the Kobayashi Maru scenario, and went on to fame as a Starfleet captain.
What if the telephone companies rewrite the rules of the game? Participate in changing the way we watch TV. In a universe of hundreds of channels and global programming, how much do we really need to watch broadcast TV anymore? With PVRs, YouTube, file swapping and multiple runs of shows across continental time-zones, people are already starting to control their viewing beyond that of the traditional broadcast medium. Why fight it?
To start with, telcos should be embracing smart boxes like TiVo. Telcos should be helping such technologies and finding solutions for digital rights management for peer-to-peer distribution of programming.
Telcos need to help stimulate changes to the way typical users watch TV – not just our kids, but our parents.
At the end of the day, we are talking a fundamental shift, a disruptive change, to broadcast TV. Maybe it is YouTube on steroids.
Telcos need to disrupt the broadcast model because the alternative means fighting the battle using the cable industry’s rules. Disruption is how you beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario.
If you don’t read the papers, you are uninformed. If you do read the papers you are misinformed.
Mark Twain
What do we say then, about the impact of YouTube on corporate advertising and spin-off parodies? In a story in the NY Times, Matt Lindley, an executive creative director at Arnold Worldwide says “I consider it the highest form of flattery to show up on YouTube.” His firm created a campaign that has made its way to YouTube with originals and parodies showing up in a search under Vonage.
My personal favourite parody ad on YouTube is the parody for Volkswagon, celebrating German engineering.
On the unmoderated, user-created internet, how do you know what is real? What is fake? How do companies protect their brands and their image in this environment?
As important, how do companies leverage the power of alternate distribution of their messages?
Allstream has released its comments and plans to have a conference call on Monday to discuss its views. I’ll comment at that time. Among the questions I have are looking for support of the following paragraph from their press release:
In its submission, MTS Allstream notes that the very specific and prescriptive language of the Wholesale Directive is at odds with the broadly-based public policy goals expressed elsewhere in the Order. Of greater concern, the Wholesale Directive appears to ignore the significant market power Canada’s largest former monopolies continue to wield, and would embrace a failed US model of deregulation that has resulted in decreased competition, reduced network investment and innovation and higher prices for American consumers and businesses.
Hmmm. I think some of us would argue that Verizon’s $20B fibre-to-the-home plan is an example of some pretty substantial ILEC investment, not to mention competition from cable companies and others for consumers.
Stay tuned for more on Allstream’s submission and others.
I recall that Dave Hagan, when he headed up residential services at Sprint Canada, used to say that he had so much fun doing his job that it’s not right to call it work. He’s now at Boingo, and I hope he is still having that kind of good time.
When we were together at Sprint Canada, he invited me to spend an hour on the phones in the customer service centre, back when I was heading up the network services group. I realized then how tough it is for those customer service reps to try to exude a smile through a telephone line, no matter how aggravated the customer may be.
I just got off the phone with the Virgin Mobile call centre in Moncton and those people love their jobs. They must take some kind of happy pills. As the woman who helped me said, “hey, we work for Richard Branson – doesn’t that say it all!”
That smile coming through the the telephone receiver is part of their competitive edge.
