Local on the 8s

The following headline appeared on Telephony's Web site last week: “Independents diving into local content.” That's great; they should — head first. Independent telephone companies are as much a part of their community as the churches and the VFW posts. And using their technology to bring their communities closer together by bringing high school football and basketball games into their customers' living rooms is just swell.

It would be a shame if large telcos missed the opportunity to do the same as they begin rolling out IPTV and other video services to their customers, even though the director of operations, unlike his or her rural counterpart, isn't likely to know the family history of every head coach nor the names of every record-holder in every high school in their far-flung, densely populated coverage areas.

Ken Pyle, co-founder of research company Viodi, said in the article that the challenge as you go up the ladder of large telcos is that they get more disconnected from their communities. But there is no reason, given the network smarts and the data-gathering prowess of their back-office systems (or at least the smarts and prowess they are going to have to develop for video services) that large service providers can't appear local. To set themselves apart from their cable provider competitors, which already offer cheesy local access channels (also mostly high school football games), telcos are going to have to bring a higher level of personalization to their services.

They are going to have to learn to look at, say, their Chicago market not as the Loop, the Outer Loop or the North Shore, but as Ukrainian Village or Bridgeport; they are going to have to recognize Englewood from Woodlawn and Lincoln Park from Little Italy, Bucktown from Wicker Park. And they should find or create programming that specifically targets the unique needs or quirks of those communities. While they're at it, they might want to take the opportunity to show those communities that there is more going on than high school sports.

The mantra for wireless providers over the next few years will be “personalization, personalization, personalization.” If the mobile guys could do it, the landline guys should be able to do it, too.

Since advanced IP video services will be interactive, service providers must do a better job of knowing its audience. Why offer Taurus Bulba to 20-somethings in Chinatown when you could actually offer them “Chinatown.” Then again, you would need a savvy cinema expert who knows that the Jack Nicholson/Faye Dunaway classic had little to do with a place called Chinatown.