NSN: TV must be open to be cool

ORLANDO — The desire to do for TV what the iPhone has done for mobile handsets is a recurring theme in conversations at the TelcoTV show this week. Perhaps no one has yet put a finer point on that topic than Brook Longdon, head of media and entertainment for Nokia Siemens Networks, who argued for open IPTV platforms as a way to unleash innovation in the space.

“Open platforms are the only way to make TV cool,” he said in a keynote address today.

The platform that NSN introduced at last year’s show — designed to enable Java and HTML developers to build applications for it — became generally available earlier this year after an initial deployment by Belgacom.

A veteran of IPTV middleware provider Myrio before it was acquired by NSN, Longdon began by pointing out that, despite billions of dollars invested by technology suppliers, most of the IPTV applications being talked about this year are not very different from the ones that were talked about at the beginning of the decade.

“IPTV innovation is too slow,” he said. “Money is not the problem. The delivery model needs to change.”

The industry can’t rely on global megavendors for the kind of rapid innovation that consumers now want from their TV, he said.

“As a global manufacturer of IPTV products, what’s demanded in the North American market is not what’s demanded in the Asian or European markets,” he said. “So I’m always aiming for the middle, and I never make anyone truly happy. … In small niche applications, I’m not fast. You don’t want to be dependent on someone who’s not fast.”

To speed things up, Longdon advocated the use of free, easy-to-use software development kits to encourage developers to build IPTV applications.

“The tools need to be free,” he said. “The killer app for IPTV is being able to make apps quickly. ‘It took me an hour to make it. If people like it, great. If not, I’ll throw it away.’ We have to be able to cycle things quickly. This is what people expect.”

In addition, he said, IPTV applications shouldn’t depend on massive user adoption to justify their own inception.

“Scale is not required for good apps,” he said. “It’s a fallacy that you have to spread them across 100 million users to get a return on your investment. If that has to happen, we’re probably not doing a good job of designing the thing.”

To achieve his open TV vision, however, industry standards will be needed that don’t exist today.

He also alluded to opportunities for service providers to add their own “secret sauce” to third-party applications, including the ability to offer a uniform look and feel to the app interfaces of various consumer devices, which should increase customer retention, he said.

“People don’t care anymore about IPTV,” he said. “They care about media. We have less conversations about what people can put on a TV set and more about how they can put media in the home.”