TV Everywhere: If everyone is running the 100 meter dash, who is running the marathon? - page 2

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scaling and diversity needed to cater to the daily consumption needs TV Everywhere consumers will demand.

To further complicate things, content that is served to multiple platforms will require a very flexible rules-based engine allowing multiple methods of payment, packaging and rights to access the content. It's easy to imagine a scenario where on a Saturday afternoon, highlights for goals or touchdowns would be sold to consumers on mobile phones for a subscription fee. If this service needed to be packaged for all sports on a network on a minute-by-minute basis -- and then instantaneously published on different platforms with different business models -- it would create a very intense and fast moving environment.

A consumer's consumption habits on the Internet have often been likened to "snacking." As such, companies who want to flourish in this environment must have the operational capacity to provide for digital snacking in all its many derivatives and flavors. As such, preparing for TV Everywhere means looking beyond the very early initiatives and building a system that will accommodate future needs.

Monetization: To Pay or Not to Pay?
Unfortunately, the ad-supported versus pay model debate has still not been settled, and companies lose money (and relevance) every day that digital media content is produced without payment.

It is therefore very important to identify content and quickly establish if it has potential pay value from the beginning. The monetization advantages of TV Everywhere are the bi-directional nature of the Internet and the diverse platforms that content can be consumed on.  Content that had no pay value on one platform could now have pay value on another platform. Adding interactivity or social aspects to programming has also proven to be very successful, and programs like American Idol generate millions of mobile phone interactions per episode. Essentially, while a base program may be exploited by an advertising model on television, it can also be augmented with other pay models on other platforms.

Reaching the consumer on a platform by using the Internet allows you to break away from the traditional linear television model -- allowing for on-demand content and servicing niche needs. Providing for as many of these opportunities as possible, in as flexible a manner as possible, is fundamental to capitalizing on the long term value of TV Everywhere. Securing these various pay packages on a number of different platforms will require a system that can apply multiple distribution formats, multiple digital rights systems and multiple payment gateways.  All these variants should be able to be very simply applied to the content and presented to the consumer in a rapid and easy- to-use manner.

Flexibility
Consumer habits and interests are constantly changing, so in order to capture the TV Everywhere opportunity, it is imperative the systems can accommodate change as rapidly as the consumers themselves.

Programmers of the successful TV Everywhere systems of the future need to be aware that the most important factor will be change -- and it will be constant. That constant change is being felt already today: no one would have known this month that the media would be captivated by golf -- and that the event that had them enraptured would not take place on a course.

These types of changes present a number of opportunities for TV Everywhere that can only be harnessed using an underlying infrastructure that can accommodate them in a short period of time and in an automated fashion. The TV Everywhere operator of the future needs a tool that can search, retrieve and compile packages of content on various platforms using meta data and archiving tools that can reuse valuable content when the opportunity presents itself.

Content Production Cost
Fortunately, moving to the Internet brings with it a number of technologies that can be specifically applied to automate and scale processes with little or no human interaction. It's always amazing to do a search on Google knowing that everything on the Internet is catalogued and indexed with little or no human intervention. TV Everywhere systems need to be able to do the same with video as well as adapt to different platforms and apply different business rules to monetize the content. In short, it must include an interface as simple as Google's for consumer access.

Costs are the fundamental reason for automated processes, as once the transition has been made to TV Everywhere, the cost of producing every variant of content will play a very important role. Unlike conventional television targeted towards mass audiences, where the production cost is distributed across many, TV Everywhere is distributed across a fragmented "snacking" audience, making cost per consumer much higher. The production and preparation cost of a piece of traditional broadcast content could be thousands of dollars, but it is done once and distributed to many.

With the fragmented distribution across broadband and multiple devices, however, publishing technology is needed that can automatically take that content and distribute across platforms. Any human interaction in the process, with the exception of case-by case editing, would never work for providing near real-time content. Imagine if every broadcasted touchdown in the above sports example was manually done by a person for distribution on every platform? The economics would outweigh the opportunity.

The same is true for TV Everywhere, and therefore it behooves those entering this business to look beyond the basic initial deployment and create from the outset a system that can economically support future business.

Do Not Get Distracted by Sprint Strategies - TV Everywhere is a Marathon
It is fundamentally important that any content providers wanting to benefit from TV Everywhere, broadband and online video opportunities find a versatile, long-term solution that can overcome these challenges. It is never beneficial to let one or two companies do the leg work for the entire industry -- innovation is bred from competition. The four challenges described above -- Scalable Publishing and Rights Management; Monetization; Flexibility; and Content Production Costs -- have not been fully addressed by any TV Everywhere initiative. It is here that other cable companies have an opportunity to differentiate themselves and simply "do it better." The next few years are going to formative, so I ask of the entire industry -- understand the limitations, explore your options and simply start running. With a robust, flexible system with the experience to overcome all four challenges, companies stand a better chance at finishing -- or even winning -- the TV Everywhere race.

Jan Steenkamp is VP of Americas and a founding member of Irdeto.  He is an expert in digital media business and protections models and has over 20 years of experience.  Jan most recently served as CEO of Entriq, now part of Irdeto.  Before joining Entriq, Jan was CEO of MIHL's technology division and Chairman of OpenTV Corp.  Prior to that, he was CEO of OpenTV.

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