Concurrent CTO speaks out on 'Start Over'
Feb 13, 2007 8:00 AM
IPTVU: Could you envision complementary technology to Start Over in the realm of advertising and commercials?
BC: Sure. In my opinion that's a next step of that. Clearly, right now what they are doing is the entire capture, but eventually ads would be dropped out, and you would end up with what would be utilized as a technique called playlist, so you could construct playlists of the content that would be captured and you would intermix that in eventually with addressable advertising so that you could get unique advertising to that particular profile that you're trying to match.
IPTVU: Do the MSOs have a legal obligation to run the commercials in the broadcaster's program?
BC: Clearly they do in the live broadcast, but on replay, I don't know. I think that will depend on whatever the nature of the negotiated contract would be. Clearly, I don't get into that.
Right now, a lot of them don't keep the content on the system that long, so maybe it's not that big of an issue whether their ads are rerun or not. Eventually, as they keep the content on the systems longer, they will want to be able to insert ads that are fresh and even beyond that and ads that have a particular profile. Maybe the profile was something as rudimentary as a zip code or something like that, but eventually they will be addressable.
IPTVU: Couldn't the same technology drive a service to allow viewers to request extended advertising on something that interests them?
BC: There has been a lot of discussion and a lot of work behind the scenes to accomplish that, to be able to telescope ads into longer advertising segments. Maybe they get into long-format ads. Certainly, there has been a lot of discussion on how to achieve that.
IPTVU: Do you see an aligned application for this Start Over technology in the IPTV market?
BC: Oh, yes. All of this technology that I am talking about is really independent of whether it is an HFC cable application or whether it's an IPTV application. At the end of the day, the device that the media is eventually received on may be different, but what we are really talking about here is all of the infrastructure that feeds those types of devices.
So, a lot of all the hard stuff is being addressed as we speak. It will be directly portable to over applications like IPTV.
IPTVU: Is there anything else you would like to add?
BC: Clearly, rights issues will continue to be negotiated. More and more content will be available, and more and more content will be made available for a longer period of time on the system. So, there will be massive amounts of storage requires. You are correct: This will lead us down the path of being in the addressable advertising space, and I really believe that at the end of the day, all of this will get combined and all broadcast and on-demand content services will run through video server complexes. So maybe at the end of the day, a number of years from now, we may end up with the major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX — as broadcast channels and everything else being captured on the system and being able to playout on demand at the subscribers' discretion. The four broadcast networks I mentioned would be captured as well.
But I wouldn't at all be surprised if that's the model we end up with in the long run, where broadcast and on-demand is combined. We've started to see that in the QAM sharing with switched digital, so I just think the plumbing changes a little bit farther upstream from all the server complexes.
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