Verizon Hub killed; Is 'fourth-screen' doomed?

Count Qwest among the service providers that sees strong potential in a fourth-screen strategy. “Hopefully we’ll be landing a vehicle such as this within the home,” said Neil E. Cox, Qwest’s executive vice president of product and IT, in an interview this week, noting however that Qwest has nothing yet to announce in this area. “We’re looking very seriously at the fourth screen.”
According to Cox, the key to such a platform is to make it extremely open and for service providers to focus on the ability to leverage in-home broadband service to deliver HD-quality apps that aren’t possible on wireless devices today. “Apps can be so much richer with a high-def experience around it,” he said, noting such a device, as compared to mobile apps, “aren’t constrained by the network at all.”

Indeed, what would a successful fourth-screen device look like, if not the Verizon Hub?

TeleChoice analyst Danny Briere wrote in TelephonyOnline earlier this year, in a review of the Verizon Hub, about what he’d like to see:

“A not too big, not too small touchscreen device (it doesn’t have to be laptop sized, just big enough to be useful – say 7" or 8"). The ability to synchronize calendars, contacts and the like – for multiple users in a family and amongst devices in the home (other touchscreens, PCs, phones, etc.),” Briere wrote. “The ability to access those downloaded-a-billion-times applications in the app store,” Briere wrote. “Add in the ability to view and control downloaded and streamed content (in other words, control an Apple TV or other device as well as display the content directly on the touchscreen). Leave out the phone and monthly service charges, and you’ve got a market maker on your hands.“

The real challenge remains the distribution question, said Current Analysis Greengart.

"Triple play providers are always looking for the device/service that makes an additional service more valuable, so if this sort of device was provided automatically with broadband service or with VoIP service -- similar to the way that cable boxes are included with cable subscriptions -- it would be an easier sell," Greengart said. "The problem is that consumers don’t value this type of convergence device enough to rent it, and we’ve seen that there isn’t enough of a market to buy it outright. Service providers will keep trying to tie their services together beyond billing, but I think you’ll see the most success with apps for the phone and PC, and with services that don’t require additional dedicated hardware in the home."