Partnerships Profit From Gaming Consoles

By Alan Smodic

It’s no secret that online streaming content is quickly becoming the first choice for many viewers and the battle to expand that beyond the computer screen continues to build.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 stand at the forefront to provide consumers with a set-top box that offers a complete multimedia experience as a gaming console, DVD or BluRay player, online content provider and social media aggregator.

Both consoles attempt to stay on top of the game, and one step ahead of the other, in this venture. But as they do, who stands to benefit the most?

A prime example of the possibilities was brought forth by Xbox last month when it was reported that the system may soon reach a deal to stream ESPN-televised sporting events, for a per-subscriber fee.

CNET gaming writer Jeff Bakalar says that setup should be a no-brainer for TV networks. “Theoretically, a TV network could reach millions of people with an Xbox Live ‘channel.’ Microsoft has sold 39 million consoles worldwide, with half of those systems hooked into Xbox Live,” he says. “With numbers like that, it’s no wonder cable companies are looking to game consoles as another outlet.”

The content provides added value to the hardware for consoles like the Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii, which benefits each company. For Xbox, it also allows the company to charge a premium for the extra content such as its current setup with Netflix streaming movies.

On the other hand, the content creators are able to reach another mass audience without much effort, thus displaying its ads to many more eyes.

Currently, however, the top streaming site, Hulu, limits its video sharing, which was not always the case. Hulu had been made previously available through applications like Boxee (a media-aggregator application for Windows, Mac or Linux) or the PS3’s browser. But that fact is leaving a number of people perplexed, including the U.S. Government, which asked NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker about the decision during a recent congressional hearing. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, Fox, ABC and others.

Zucker’s response to the questioning didn’t clarify a thing. “This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content,” he says.

Boxee issued a response almost instantly, stating that it uses a browser to access the content, just as anyone with a computer or PS3 was already doing and wasn’t stealing a thing. It even offered to speak with Zucker and noted that Hulu should be taking advantage of Boxee’s userbase.

“There are now close to a million people using Boxee,” Boxee says in a statement. “When they watch shows from Hulu they are watching the ads and generate real revenues to NBC. We hope we will be able to work with NBC and offer more content and value to Boxee users as we believe a good number of our users will also be willing to pay one-time or subscription fees to access NBC’s content.”

Boxee, in addition to its computer software, has plans to release its own set-top box later this year, which will provide direct competition to the gaming consoles — minus the gaming factor.

The high number of consoles already sold (a reported 60 percent of American homes have at least one console), though, gives the PS3 and Xbox 360 a nice headstart. But, as Hulu is showing, providing that content can be tricky.

“We want to offer the best entertainment on Xbox Live in as many countries as we can,” Xbox corporate VP John Schappert told G4 at E3. “But it takes a while to get these deals done, it takes a while to form these relationships, form these partnerships and find a great experience for [all] of our partners.”

In addition to streaming other videos, both Microsoft and Sony have offered their own direct-to-console shows - The Guild, which airs exclusively on Xblox LIVE; and The Tester, a free reality TV show that will debut on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable this month.

The success of these two ventures for the gaming giants opens another realm of content distribution. With that in mind, they both are poised to serve as a be-all, end-all box-top system.

That success, however, may lie with whomever secures the better partnerships first and that answer could come soon enough.

YahooTV: Paving the Way to an Open IPTV?

By Sheila Shayon

IPTV is spreading, slowly, across the globe. By year end 2009 the universe of homes that were receiving IPTV services was 26 million. By year end 2014 that number is expected to reach 70 million worldwide.

The greatest growth in IPTV is in countries with established high-speed Internet technologies including the Netherlands, South Korea, Hong Kong and France. As technology progresses, still developing countries like China will catch up quickly in subscription numbers.

Dashboard widgets first hit the market with Mac OS X Tiger. They are very small applets designed to convey quick bites of information or a quick change of setting. Some familiar forms of widgets include clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather. A.k.a. gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule, snippet, mini and flake, Web widgets most often use Adobe Flash.

Last year, Yahoo made the bold promise that Internet TV widgets would be the major phenomenon of the year. Launched as Connected TV in 2009, Internet-enabled widgets allow viewers with compatible TVs to access Twitter, Facebook and certain news feeds.

That prediction did not materialize, but Yahoo has now upped the ante and launched a new TV widget chip ready for installation in set-top boxes. Having entered into a deal with chip manufacturers MIPS and Sigma, Yahoo widgets can now be installed in a range of hardware. Yahoo widgets enable Internet-connected TVs access to online video with one or two clicks on the remote. The widgets show up as snippets in a “dock” at the bottom of the TV screen or via a widget directory in a panel at the left of the screen.

Yahoo’s latest partners include: Netflix, VUDU, Amazon VOD, Showtime, CBS, CinemaNow/Blockbuster and video catalogs from FrameChannel, Brightcove, Zinc and 1Cast. Previously available only on newly manufactured HDTVs, a new device that will carry Yahoo widgets was introduced at CES: the ViewSonic media server, VMP80. Yahoo’s Widget development kit is now publicly available.

It seems as if Internet-ready TV manufacturers are no longer controlling the Web-surfing experience — and Yahoo has opened the doors.

Sheila Shayon is president/founder of Third Eye Media, third-eyemedia.com, multimedia production with core competencies in broadband production, creative design and execution, and social media. Shayon has several decades of multimedia experience working for companies like Time Warner Cable and Home Box Office.

WatchNBuy.com to White-Label its Interactive Video Commerce Player

By: itvt.com

Interactive video commerce company, WatchNBuy.com, announced Wednesday that it is offering its interactive video player on a white-label basis to other Web site operators.

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Exclusive Content No More: IPTV Free Market Opens Floodgates

By John Greaves

Exclusivity in IPTV was once standard industry practice. Device manufacturers could differentiate themselves from their competition a la the Xbox 360 deal with Netflix and people who purchased a device were potential customers for content producers. “Content companies traditionally made money by controlling distribution,” says Rob Green, senior vice president of business development for Imagine Communications, which serves the traditional HDTV and SDTV digital broadcast markets as well as emerging areas such as VOD, Internet Video and IPTV. “In the past you had to sit in front of the TV, you had to buy newspapers to get news. Companies tried to continue this model because it’s very profitable.”

However, the free market abhors exclusivity. FierceIPTV recently reported that French Telecom’s Orange has been given the thumbs down because of its anti-competition approach to on-demand content. It’s debatable how that affects the U.S. market but indicators show companies are copying Netflix’s decision to court both Microsoft and Sony.

This isn’t necessarily bad for the consumer or for business. Boxee, which is currently the only open source platform of its kind, has been very successful with the open model and according to Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing, feels no pressure to revert to the traditional approach. “You’re able to get much more content to your users and much more quickly. Certainly we do have agreements with providers like Netflix, Pandora and Major League Baseball to access their content on Boxee, but what we’re able to do is bring in content from smaller independent sites [that] also have great content,” Kippen says.

Although Boxee has chosen complete openness, Green says the immediate future will feature either short-term exclusive agreements or what he calls licensing agreements.

“You have WiMax, cable boxes, modems, IPTV, DSL - so many of these network types and they all need content. Content companies have started to do far less exclusive agreements and far more licensing agreements for different devices. If you do see exclusivity it’s usually a short-term agreement almost from a promotional standpoint,” Green says.

These short-term agreements and licensing agreements can lead to intricate relationships among the industry players. For example, Amazon is the exclusive supplier of the Moxi HD DVR. Amazon also provides its video-on-demand service to Yahoo-equipped TVs made by various manufacturers. Yahoo, meanwhile, has also announced it will make BrightCove available on Yahoo-connected TVs, which compete with Roku and Boxee. Amazon the retailer competes with Wal-Mart, which is buying Vudu — a similar business to Boxee (but is more of a video rental entity).

Insiders say this is simply the free market operating the way it should in response to market pressure. “People are trying to cram functionality into devices without increasing cost. I’m a big believer that we’re going to end up in the space where everyone will have access to the same content,” says Keith Kocho, president and founder of ExtendMedia, which provides services that enable content providers and distributors to create, deliver, manage and monetize online content offerings over many devices. “I think when you turn your device on there should be any number of icons,” Kocho says.

Kippen agrees. “The goal for us is to be the OS that runs your living room whether we’re on a TV, set top box, or game console; we want to work with all those manufacturers. We want you to be able to buy a Sony TV and have Boxee installed on it,” he says.

According to Kocho, the trend is toward a market where price and value to the consumer will be how companies set themselves apart. “How you present a search engine and user interface to enable the user to find what they want, bundling content and what you have to offer from a price point and how it can be delivered to other devices you have will be critical to help users differentiate between your service and others,” Kocho says.

Providers will likely differ on how to accomplish this due to cost and the need to protect their intellectual property. “Most of these projects are proprietary so what Google and Yahoo are doing is different than what Boxee is doing,” Kocho adds.

Industry experts predict the two hotly contested areas will be consumer living rooms and mobile devices with monetization at the heart of what providers offer and how.

“I suspect that’s what’s going to happen is all of these guys want to aggregate the user experience in the living room and they will want to bill for it. They’ll want to upgrade the customer from what is a free service where they don’t have much participation in advertising revenue to a premium content,” Kocho says.

An early example of this is Boxee’s new payment platform that will enable users to purchase content online. Kippen says Boxee plans to pay for this by collecting a percentage of the payment for content. This is in addition to its planned offering that will attempt to link social networks with television viewership. “We’re building a new feature so you can pull information from social networks in to Boxee. You will be able to come home and see what your friends are doing on your TV,” he says.

Despite the furor over streaming content, Kocho cautions that no one should write off traditional providers. “I think the main thing from a strategy point is I don’t think anyone is going to wake up tomorrow and cancel their cable subscription, there’s a whole lot of technical reasons that won’t happen, but we’ll see companies like Boxee and Netflix start to erode that,” Kocho says.

Green agrees. “I think consumers want the content they want, how they want, where they want it. What system that delivers that [content] I don’t think they care - whether it’s streamed or pre packaged in devices. The trend is that there will be more avenues, more devices and more opportunities to get content,” he says.

Boxee to Launch Payment Platform for Content Providers This Summer

By: http://www.itvt.com

In a posting on over-the-top-TV specialist Boxee’s corporate blog, Wednesday, CEO Avner Ronen announced that the company plans to release a payment platform this summer that will allow users to purchase content “with one click on the remote.”

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Interactive Commercials Show Strong Early Results

By: adage.com

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — After years of one-off tests, single-market trials and several false starts, interactive TV advertising finally achieved scale this fall when Cablevision became the first cable operator to offer the technology across its full footprint of 3.1 million subscribers in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area.

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