More thoughts on social media. Tonight’s unoriginal idea: radio for two. Grab a service like epitonic, which lets you create a personalised radio station based on your genre choices. Simultaneously stream to two people, either of whom can control the “skip” button.
Now you and your loved one can have a virtual snuggle knowing nobody else is listening to the same set as you, and your other half is hearing and enjoying just the same music you are — even if they’re the other side of the globe.
Next week, you can look forward to articles on why IPTV is such an innovative idea, and how IMS is going to unleash a torrent of telco service innovation upon us. Err. Not. Funny, isn’t it, how all those 3G TV and music services are creating facsimiles of old broadcast and unicast media when the users have shown a clear preference for doing things in groups of two or more…
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:52 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Martin
Here in the U.S., SBC and Microsoft have an enormous breakthrough: they've invented picture-in-picture.
Actually, that's a little cheap, because they are doing useful things with it like previewing your channel change. But that's how desperate they are to find a distinction. When the cable networks start with 600 channels and lots of video on demand, not easy to out do them on content.
Only way I can think to really have a better service is to stay open, and let everyone from Google to the Southern Baptist Conference to the BBC stream direct to your users. That will cost you some TV subscribers, but give you such a superior service the business choice becomes a tough one.
With strong competition, carriers would have no choice. With two players in the U.S., results are unclear. Verizon talks about staying open, SBC intends to be closed. The fear the latter, with the cableco's co-operation, could close the net at live video speeds is why we are shouting so loudly for "net neutrality." Hope you don't wind up needing it in Europe as well.
Dave Burstein
Posted by: at November 28, 2005 04:20 AMIn the U.S., the MSOs' vertical integration (content plus distribution) provides them with a significant advantage over the telcos. The telcos should seek to turn this apparent strength into a weakness by fostering a business model where content providers and consumers interact directly. IPTV is potentially a strong enabler of such a model. The question is whether the telcos (which are conservative by nature) will have the modest ambition of replicating the cable approach where the pipe provider also acts as the retail provider of content, or the more subversive ambition of eliminating the middleman. At this time, they seem to be leaning toward the former.
Posted by: at November 28, 2005 03:41 PM