When everyone's a star

At the end of March, software vendor MyDTV, which for four years has specialized in personalized programming search and recommendation engines for set-top box vendors, changed its name to MeeVee and abandoned its model of focusing on a single piece of hardware. The change went largely unnoticed by most, except perhaps the company's customers and a few cable industry insiders.

But the decision to move away from a set position in the networking food chain and into a more amorphous role is symbolic of a great shift in the market — an ever-multiplying number of entertainment options via the TV screen. Not only are the number of cable channels multiplying (ESPN alone has almost five options of traditional broadcast), but the entire model of content distribution is changing, potentially raising the number of available channels exponentially.

“When you see the landscape changing, the amount of content is not only multiplying, but the problem of finding what to watch is compounded,” said Michael Raneri, chief marketing officer for MeeVee. “We said, ‘let's take a device- and platform-independent play.’ Our primary focus is helping consumers find something to watch. Our strategy is to position ourselves in this disruptive model.”

Locating that one piece of content may get harder, though, as telcos move into the video market and possibly play a major role in the new evolving structure. Already with broadband access, consumers can download thousands of pieces of video content over the Web. MovieLink and CinemaNow, both of which have signed marketing agreements with several telcos, simply wouldn't exist if weren't for DSL and cable modem access. Though both services are designed for users to watch full-length feature movies on their PCs and laptops, telcos increasingly are looking at using the same models for TV-based entertainment.

Akimbo, which sells a set-top player that can download movies and TV programs worldwide, is among the first to make the leap. Although Akimbo is sold through retail channels, many carriers and vendors are creating some specific product road maps to allow such services either on a network-hosted model or using their own customer premises equipment.

“We have looked at video and said there are great parallels between Internet and where video is going,” said Frank Weiner, vice president of field marketing for Calix. “It's moving from a handful of content producers deciding what everyone watches to the global production world. [Video] is just a data file, and a file can be uploaded onto a server.”

In “The Book on Video,” written by Weiner when telco video was little more than a couple of independent telcos deploying VDSL-based networks, he introduced the concept of personal media channels. Under one example, a user's set-top box would establish a dedicated bandwidth service connection to an IPTV host content provider, which could be anyone from a traditional broadcaster to a favorite Internet-based video blog.

“You deal with it in two ways,” Weiner said. “One is [letting users go to the public] Internet and its best effort. The other model is that I, as a provider, may offer, say, a channel 700, and I provide switch-dedicated bandwidth to give you access to those content sources.”

The service implications — and perhaps user expectations — in both models are significantly different. If carriers allow users to go to any location on the public Internet to watch streamed video, it would be treated like any other best-effort Web traffic. However, if carriers are providing access to content as a service, Weiner said, it falls into a different regulatory and moral category.

Either way, the day isn't too far off when users will become content producers.

“My kids will be creating their own content and making it available to their friends,” Weiner said.

On the industry technology front, one of the first steps to achieving that goal is increasing the upstream speed (from subscribers to servers). Currently, most U.S. broadband subscribers get well under 1 Mb/s of upstream speed regardless of their downstream capabilities. In some cases, it should be noted, carriers intentionally have kept upstream speed slow to discourage users from hogging bandwidth by acting as servers in peer-to-peer networks. The development of VDSL2, though, may change that. Ken Madison, senior product marketing manager of chip vendor Centillium, said the current thought process within the committee creating VDSL2 is for upstream speeds to range anywhere from 30 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s (see related story on page 36).

In Asia, where carriers such as KT and KDDI in Korea and Japan Telecom and Yahoo Broadband in Japan have deployed the original version of VDSL, some of the fastest-growing services involve users producing their own content and putting it on public servers for anyone to see.

“If you look at KDDI, they already have the content, and one of the biggest things is using it for personal karaoke,” said Rajesh Vashist, president and CEO of chip vendor Ikanos, which has been shipping VDSL chipsets into Asia for several years. “Every wave starts at the edge, and I think peer-to-peer networking is going to be the next big thing in North America. Giving people the ability to share pictures over their TV is something that may push things along.”

Already, numerous Web-based companies are trying to give users an additional shove with sites and services that make it relatively simple to create and upload content to servers. MPEG Nation, a division of Digital Silo, for example, recently announced a service that allows users to encode and stream consumer and commercial video content via its servers.

For a six-month subscriber fee of $4.95, users with a digital video camera first transfer content from their cameras to their PCs, then upload their video to MPEG Nation in a variety of formats (currently the company accepts avi, .mov, .mp4, .wmv, .asf, .dv, .mpg and .rm content). Users with traditional video cameras are given the option of sending tapes to MPEG Nation to have the company do the encoding and uploading. In either case, all content is publicly available to anyone, and users are given unlimited storage space.

Initially, the company is promoting the idea of video blogs, video auctions linked from e-Bay or simply e-mailing video messages to friends and family. Users, though, are already finding unique uses.

One New Jersey Realtor has used the service to videotape his listings and has potential buyers do a video tour of properties before he shows them, according to Lissy Skolnick, spokesperson for MPEG Nation.

“He doesn't waste his time or one of his potential clients' times,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are already into this, like videographers. They use us to stream demonstrations of what they can do — things like weddings and other events.”

Similar services have taken off as well. Last month, Atlanta-based video content management service provider Vidiac said it had hit its 1 million-view milestone less than six weeks after going live.

And while virtually every user currently is viewing the finished products on their PC, telcos clearly are thinking of ways to transfer that experience to the TV. In some ways, the development of personal video recorders such as TiVO and ReplayTV and, even more so, on-demand services by cable operators, has started conditioning users to expect more choices in their viewing. Telcos, though, are in a position to take advantage because of their network architecture and developing technology.

“What's happening with SBC and the way they're using the phone network is very relevant to being able to use central repositories,” MeeVee's Raneri. “[The central repository] is not going to be a physical place but a virtual place, and what pulls it together is the place that the user stores his preferences.”

Telco links

MovieNow — Has deals to distribute content via SBC's Yahoo-branded DSL; has co-branding agreement with BellSouth; signed deal to co-brand movies through Verizon broadband in April.

CinemaNow — Has distribution deals with BT and Chunghwa Telecom; signed deal to launch Internet video-on-demand through SBC.