How will IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) be different from the broadband "value-added"
How will IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) be different from the broadband "value-added" services we associate today with a computer? What lessons does the United Kingdom - an early adopter of IPTV - have for the rest of the world?
[Pictured Centre] Dr William Cooper (the PhD is in Communications) is an expert on the convergence of interactive media. As Head of Interactive for BBC Broadcast, he was responsible for the operational delivery of the BBC's online and interactive television services. At the BBC he oversaw the exponential growth of online services and the launch of interactive services on satellite, terrestrial and cable television. He joined the BBC as Head of Online Operations from the Press Association, where he was responsible for taking traditional newswire systems onto the web with the launch of online syndication services for news, features, photos and press releases. There he also led the development of Ananova, the world's first virtual newscaster. The Ananova division was subsequently acquired by the mobile telecommunications company Orange for £95 million.
In this interview he talks in detail about the qualities, technology and business model of IPTV, touching on some of the issues he explored in the report informitv.com recently published about it.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 2,748
There are many misconceptions about IPTV, but Geof Heydon, Director of Innovation and Mark
There are many misconceptions about IPTV, but Geof Heydon, Director of Innovation and Market Development at Alcatel, is an expert in the IPTV future. In this interview he separates fact from fallacy in the IPTV and "multi-service network" world. For one thing, IPTV is delivered over a separate IP network that is not the Internet. It is not something you can do on the Web today (or even in the future). It is about offering video in all its forms, TV on demand, free-to-air TV and even pay-TV together - and richly imbued with simultaneously available multiple broadband connections, Voice Over IP phone circuits, video conferences and so on. But it will take place on a very different kind of network from those in use in Australia today.
Heydon explains the work to evolve the existing broadband networks towards IPTV, but also the entirely new networks that may be built to succeed the existing HFC cable when the latter wears out. Only new networks will be able to overcome the high "background contention ratios" that prevent today's networks from delivering the end-to-end performance needed for IPTV. It is that high speed that allows IPTV features such as quick channel changes. ADSL2+ is a major upgrade to the access component of the network and that is one significant requirement of IPTV.
But that's just a start, says Heydon. You also need the network backbone to be upgraded, and for a small country such as Australia, it is not clear that the market can be allowed to look after itself without a visionary Government ensuring faster networks are implemented via a sensible regime of new incentives to the broadband industry. Heydon talks about the issues that have faced SBC, a telco in the USA that is using IPTV from Alcatel and Microsoft to wage combat against the leaching of triple play cable competition. (The SBC IPTV offering is expected to light up at the end of this year.) Heydon talks about broadband companies in places such as Italy, where FastWEB has many lessons for the Asia Pacific region.
Heydon also talks about the specifics of today's user experience, with early systems such as the Microsoft Windows Media Centre and the Elgato EyeTV, or the Foxtel IQ PVR, offering the first glimpse of the IPTV benefits, but nowhere near the actual promise of a fully realised IPTV regime. Trickle fed video services on today's Internet can't deliver Standard Definition, let alone High Definition channels, with hundreds of such channels being instantly accessible. That requires a lot more network sophistication and a TV-oriented experience, rather than a PC-oriented experience.
And such a unified delivery system also establishes a unified TCP/IP environment so that 3G networks' video-capable mobile handsets will seamlessly interoperate with the TV world, allowing applications to interoperate across both platforms with video shared and used appropriately on each. That means a unified user identification system, with a dramatic decrease in the number of passwords people will need to remember. It also means a much better capacity for the network to intuit each user's needs based on its understanding of the user's personal wants and needs as they assume each "personality" in their broadband life. Notwithstanding the potentially chilling confidentiality issues, one result will be that TV will serve different advertisements to children, as compared with when the parents watch TV later in the evening. It means a game player's profile in shoot 'em ups (established during that person's teen years) will be maintained separately from that player's more sober business profile during a day in the office.
In the IPTV world, it will also be possible for each device in a consumer's life to control or access each other device. For example, a parent may use a Personal Digital Assistant while on the road, to transmit a message to the TV screen telling the children it is time for bed.
Heydon describes a metaphor: when water and electricity were installed a century ago, no one anticipated the dishwasher or clothes washing machine. But the way those early utility services, once so separate, eventually converged into new forms so useful that they are almost ubiquitous throughout the developed world, is a signpost to how today's broadband services are likely to mix and match into new and ubiquitous forms in coming years.
And that thinking raises the vital issue of how entrepreneurs and technology strategists will profit from these changes. Heydon describes some of the new businesses and new products envisaged today, that will forge the profitable broadband value propositions of the next decade.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 17,725
Stephen Sewell wrote the script for chilling movies such as The Boys and Lost Things. His
Stephen Sewell wrote the script for chilling movies such as The Boys and Lost Things. His plays bristle with ideas as well as drama and his many titles, including The Blind Giant is Dancing, Welcome the Bright World and Sisters, are studied in schools and universities across Australia. So how does one of the nation's leading writers make sense of the recent wave of terrorism and violence and how is it affecting his future work?
Stephen Sewell is about to leave for an overseas Festival where his powerful drama, Myth, Propaganda & Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, is to get its first international production. But just prior to departure, Netvideo caught up with him at his Bondi Beach apartment to ponder the state of the world. He talks about 21st Century challenges for a social critic and the crisis for democracy, for the rule of law and for even the very ecology that supports life on our planet.
He also describes his forthcoming direction of the film version of his widely admired play, Sisters, staring Stellan Skarsgard, Jacqueline MacKenzie and Rachel Blake.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 874
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Dale Herigstad, creative leader of LA-based digital media agency, Schematic, has won three
Dale Herigstad, creative leader of LA-based digital media agency, Schematic, has won three Emmy awards and tackles the world's most fascinating media projects.
It is Schematic that designs the new XBox360 interface. It is Schematic that leads the new media thrust for the latest Battlestar Galactica franchise. It was Schematic that created the ground breaking games and other new media assets for the Winter Olympics. It was Schematic that experimented with Bravo around the TV show, Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, regarding product placement and combining different device experiences around the show brand, before, during and after broadcast, and moving themed content from the TV, to the PC, to the mobile phone.
Dale mentored aspiring film, TV, game and mobile content makers at the X|Media Lab in Singapore at Broadcast Asia 2005. In this interview, conducted while he was in Singapore, Dale discussed his work at the epicentre of those cross media industries.
Dale talks about areas such as the interplay between 3G mobile phone interfaces and the Microsoft Windows Media Center. He contrasts the American media world with that in Asia. And he describes the issues that have arisen for the international collaborations that the X|Media Lab fosters in the interactive media space. Dale also talks about the crucial changes he expects to occur in the media and technology sectors in coming years and how he anticipates media companies will meet such challenges.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 1,435
Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web, Mark P
Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web, Mark Pesce is now based in Australia and espousing his philosophy of Internet "swarm" audiences and peer-to-peer "hyper-distribution" via the Australian Film, TV and Radio School.
The author of five books, Pesce is a ferociously illuminating technologist, futurist and philosopher. Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED and The New York Times have profiled him and his views on the interactive age. He has written himself for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and serves on the editorial board of TRIP magazine.
From 1998 through 2000, Pesce chaired the Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern California's world-renowned School of Cinema-Television. His mandate - to bring cinema and broadcast television into the interactive era - led him to create a program that encouraged creative vision and is now producing a generation of entertainment professionals shaping the media of the 21st century.
Pesce's current projects include TRUE HALLUCINATIONS, an opera based on the life and death of ethnobotanist and philosopher Terence McKenna, and The Next Big Thing, a book chronicling the science, business and politics of nanotechnology.
In this interview, Mark Pesce talks about the how the profound changes in technology consumption and distribution are likely to reshape the media landscape in the next couple of years. He describes in depth the legal, financial and philosophical implications of peer-to-peer networking, IPv6, nano-technology, mobile wireless video devices, identity management and theft, copyright and piracy.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 4,082
Robert Connolly's films have been particularly haunting - and particularly difficult to fi
Robert Connolly's films have been particularly haunting - and particularly difficult to finance. The Film and TV office called him morally reprehensible for putting such "scummy" characters (as were called for by the script of The Boys), on the big screen. But Connolly is pleased with recent changes to funding via script assessment at the Australian Film Finance Commission.
In this interview, Connolly talks about how he has undergone what he calls a "toughening up" in his film work. He puts his characters in situations where they are tested - ethically and financially - and is now growing that framework into new areas. Connolly talks about today's political climate in Australia and poses questions about the vision of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Connolly also talks about one of his most recent projects in which he is thinking about an adaptation of a Zola novel, set in an Asian city after military action and the rise of a frightening new religious ideology.
Finally, Robert Connolly talks about changes in the way producers must think about distributing their work in the digital era. He describes how he is experimenting with high-definition TV and the challenges of scaling up to entirely new business models that transcend cinema for the feature film. For Connolly, the business realities of film making have plunged the industry into crisis. "It sometimes seems like every element of our business is designed to keep income away from the people who design and produce it," he says. Connolly analyses the economics of film making and puts his view of the new Australian Screen Council's chance of rectifying the problem.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 512
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TV producer, Rene Balcer, says defending his show's "real estate" on American prime time t
TV producer, Rene Balcer, says defending his show's "real estate" on American prime time television has been like "herding cats" (he has got through 93 episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent and about 400 episodes of Law and Order regardless). LA-based but Canadian-born Balcer says anxiety and fear help creativity so he doesn't shy away from the battle (afterall, he began his career as a combat camera man during the 1973 Yom Kippur war so he has been inured to stress from the start).
In this interview Balcer talks about how his shows tackle the fallout of 9/11 and how "fear" has become big business in America. Balcer says themes reminiscent of the detention at Guantanamo Bay of Australian David Hicks have found a place in some of the plots he has explored throughout Law and Order's long life. He talks about how the show has tackled legal issues such as the Material Witness Warrant that is part of the police powers provided by America's Patriot Act. The actual boundaries of freedom for screenwriters in the USA are explored as well as the interplay between real-life law makers and the fictional plots.
Balcer also talks about the Fox series, 24, contrasting the way Balcer's own TV series deal with issues of terrorism and politics. Balcer's view is that the way 24 appears to condone torture as an effective way to produce valuable intelligence results is offensive to him. He describes the repercussions this may have for Americans in an increasingly troubled "real life" world. Finally he talks about the troubling role of the screenwriter in an era when people may vote for a politician or take action in real life, because his or her views or behavior are aligned with those of someone like 24's hero, Jack Bauer.
Rene Balcer's awards include the Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Teleplay, three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America, the Peabody Award, two Silver Gavel Awards from the American Bar Association, and the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America. He has many other television credits apart from Law and Order, ranging from ground breaking (and Award winning) pilots through to writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 2,630
Richard Titus is a new media legend. His Los Angeles digital company Schematic and film pr
Richard Titus is a new media legend. His Los Angeles digital company Schematic and film production company Plinyminor have been associated with some of the most exciting projects in the world today (see Netvideo's interview with Schematic's Dale Herigstad). Titus says the thinking he has done for his global speaking commitments over the last couple of years about the Long Tail content phenomenon has impelled him to focus more squarely on the creation of genre, low-cost, high-value content with a long shelf life.
Plinyminor is the result. Titus has two films in production, a TV show and three more films he will finish by the end of March 2006. Most of his product is sci-fi or action. He tries to have the projects break even out of pre-sales (a combination of soft money and the initial licensing fees) so that all profit from the "long tail" phenomenon becomes profit "ever more".
In this interview, Titus talks about how he believes the advent of IPTV will affect the stories film makers tell. He says long form TV and film is his prime focus today, but long term, because he owns the copyright, there is room to experiment widely. That will be via mobisodes and via cross-property links.
He says he is starting a project now which is both a game and a movie simultaneously. "Game development for a large platform title like that is 3-5 years and film development is usually 18months to three years. So we start the game first with the idea we will launch the game and film simultaneously for maximum impact," he says. He says today's producers know the "silo" of the world they work in, but they don't think outside of that enough. Ensuring that properties come to fruition in the right time frame is an increasingly important part of that, he explains.
Titus also expresses his view that broadband unbundling is a good thing and explains why. He says the forced unbundling in America helped telcos realise it was a great profit centre; the recent FCC decision against unbundling Titus believes will be overturned.
Finally Titus discusses the creative opportunities that have lit up as film makers turn to game engines to power their film environment, taking advantage of a new form of animation called machinima.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 1,417
Mark Meadows pursues digital creativity at the intersection of visual art, literature, and
Mark Meadows pursues digital creativity at the intersection of visual art, literature, and computer interactivity. He has worked at Xerox-PARC as Artist-in-Residence, at Stanford Research Institute on Artificial Intelligence start-ups, and has co-founded three companies that develop business plans drawing on artificial intelligence, interactive narrative or virtual reality. His 3D animation and interactive designs have powered works by Lucasfilm, Sony Pictures, and Microsoft. In 2002 he wrote, Pause & Effect; The Art of Interactive Narrative. He is now writing a book on Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Emotion, and the roles interactive characters play in emerging forms of narrative. He is also working as creative director on a video game with architect, Frank Gehry, and the band, Radiohead.
In this interview, Mark talks about what he has learned by working on these diverse and fascinating projects. He describes the trends he sees emerging and contemplates the most likely futures for the game and AI industries.
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Added: 1 year ago
Views: 10,655
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