Kate Bulkley, Media Analyst.

Broadband visions

By Kate Bulkley

Cable & Satellite Europe

www.informamedia.com

01 Jan 2007

I have an iPod, two mobile phones, a Blackberry, a Sky Plus box, a Slingbox, at least three different remote controls for my TV, a plethora of media memory cards and I know that this isn't the end of my cache of must-have devices. In 2007, my list is going to get longer because the devices I prefer to use to get my media, my calls, my agenda and, increasingly it seems, my identity, keep shifting.

There is no better place to see the changes screaming down the technology speedway than at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This techfest always starts the year off with a bang and 2007 was no exception. Big-name executives, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Nokia's Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Disney's Bob Iger keynoted at CES. Some, like Barry Meyer, CEO of Warner Brothers Entertainment, looked slightly out of place given that this is not the kind of venue at which these content-centric guys would have hung out in the past. But times are clearly changing.

The big trend at CES of particular note to all those in pay-TV land was the number of different solutions for displaying broadband content on TV screens more easily. Whereas the networked home has been the big mantra for several years, it has not been easy to choose or to install a decent system. Remember Microsoft Network Centre? I know, I know: it does work, but easy to set up? Not.

In the broadband to TV space, Apple announced the Apple TV device (its answer to the home hub), which can stream video taken from the internet to a TV with the ability to browse for shows or trailers via the iTunes store. Apple's CES TV announcement was overshadowed by its launch - at MacWorld in California - of the iPhone, which certainly captured most of the headlines. (Despite a very sexy touchscreen, Apple will find it tough to do to the cellular telephone market what it did to the MP3 player market. The iPhone is expensive at $500 (€386), only downloads songs from iTunes and this first iteration with Cingular in the US is not even true 3G! Of course, even with these caveats, the iPhone will likely be a financial success. All Apple has to do is capture 1% of the nearly one billion cell phones sold every year and it's got a healthy 10m-unit business.)

Meanwhile, Slingmedia introduced the SlingCatcher, a set-top box that takes content from a PC and displays it on a TV screen. Slingmedia came to the attention of the TV community last year with the Slingbox, a device that allows you to take your TV content via a broadband connection to your PC while you are away from home. The new Sling device can also stream content from a remote Slingbox to another TV set.

Among these net-to-TV devices was "USB TV" from Sandisc, the maker of flash memory cards. You use the USB stick-like device to download a movie from the LoveFilm website and then attach it to your TV via a USB docking station attached to the s-video outlet. Not to be outdone, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said that new features are coming to the Xbox 360 that will turn the device, typically used to play games and to download television programmes and movies, into an IPTV receiver that will allow people to watch video from the Internet on their TV screens.

With all this coming fast, it is no mystery why cable, telecom and satellite players are scrambling to get their own broadband businesses up and running. BSkyB has partnered with Google for its Sky by Broadband service and it is also taking a page out of cable's book with the recent launch of See, Speak and Surf, a package of broadband at 8Mb, a large Sky TV package of channels and low-cost phone calls for £26 (€39) a month (plus £11 a month for line rental from BT). Meanwhile British Telecom, with its recently launched BT Vision service, is offering a 160 GB hard drive, two digital TV receivers, and video-on-demand via a broadband connection (provided by BT Broadband, of course!)

Meanwhile, the growth of video streaming sites on the net rushes on, with YouTube being beefed up by its new owner Google and content companies like CBS and the BBC creating online community sites based around their popular content. Illustrating how the online and TV world are moving, at CES Slingmedia CEO Blake Kirkorian shared a stage with CBS CEO Les Moonves to unveil 'Clip + Sling', a new technology which allows users to clip content from live or recorded TV and share it with anyone, including non-Slingbox owners. The clip can be sent in an e-mail that plays the video from a hosted portal.

Also gaining credibility (and content rights) are legal P2P streaming video platforms, like that offered by BitTorrent and, most recently, by Joost (formerly the Venice Project), being rolled out by the founders of Kazaa and Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström.

Everyone, it seems, wants to be the destination video distribution platform. And once online, it is increasingly easy to move that video - both free and paid-for - onto the TV screen in the living room.

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