Here’s a riddle for you. If service providers do it, is it still considered over-the-top?
After listening to a bunch of third quarter earnings calls and reading the stories about MSO plans this week, that’s a realistic riddle, if there is such a thing. Nearly to a man, executives from the major MSOs unveiled either plans or intentions to make IP and the Internet (the two are not interchangeable) a part of their future service offerings. If someone else, say, an IP company like Apple or Google or even movies company like Netflix was doing this, it would be called going over-the-top of the service provider. When the service provider does it, I think, it’s just good business sense.
All this talk about IP offerings and the power of the connected home, however, left me with another riddle. How do you make it happen when there are so many standards, specifications and generally proprietary ways of doing it. Apple, of course, has always followed this course and has done damned well by it. But Apple is an exception to what has always been a rule.
Video recording didn’t really become commonplace until VHS finally put down Beta. High definition disks were caught in a quagmire as HD DVD and Blu-ray struggled; once Blu-ray won, things moved along at laser speed.
That, to me, is what’s holding up the connected home more than content rights and technology and service offerings and platforms. There’s no one way to do it; no Internet, so to speak, to deliver the Internet.
Last week, Jeff Miller—the prez and CEO of ActiveVideo Networks—spoke at NewTeeVee Live about the value of the cloud. Since it’s based on the Internet, the cloud is a great spot to start unifying the delivery of content to the connected home—however proprietary that content may be. Cloud aggregation defeats what we’re calling “platform chaos” much as VHS defeated Beta and Blu-ray smacked down HD DVD.
It doesn’t mean that one platform will mean one service offering. Far from it. Content is content; it’s the differentiator that carries the day whether delivered by a cable operator, satellite provider or telco. Getting that content to the end user shouldn’t be a chore, a multitask as it were, for applications providers. There should be one platform to which to write the content and a multitude of ways to deliver and receive it.
Over-the-top, whatever it’s called, is real. It’s the connected home. It’s IP in the TV and the set-top box and the DVD player and even the camera. It’s also much better served via a single source platform, for now at least, nestled in the Internet cloud.
