I’ve been working on digital strategy from a number of different perspectives over the last few years – I’ve worked with Telco’s and Media co’s trying to move us closer to a vision of the Digital Home – and at various stages it’s felt like big pieces of the digital strategy puzzle are falling into place.
First it was reaching mass adoption of Broadband, taken for granted now but it felt like a long jouney.
Then the war of Music Downloading, a series of tough battles leaving few standing and most not where they wanted to be, that established a download/on-demand expectation for entertainment consumers.
Along the way much posturing and occasional stuttering progress in the transition from DVD to download, and that feels like another journey that will,be long and painful.
But at the same time the way we watch TV programmes is going through perhaps the most exciting changes. We now take for granted multi-channel TV with a choice of services – the choice of which will extend even further in the UK with Sky introducing services via the ariel and Freeview being joined or superceded by Freesat. Not to mention the fact that BT are making progress with their Vision service, and unfortunately Virgin Media seem to be taking three steps back for every step the others take forward.
In addition to all that we have Timeshifting and Placeshifting – two concepts that sound like they belong in a dodgy Sci-Fi movie but actually are happening in more and more households right now. Timeshifting is easy enough now with the introduction of PVRs like Sky+ mean that we are increasingly making our own decisions about when we want to watch our favourite programmes rather than being dictated to by the programmers schedule (also of course many of us fast forwarding through the ads) which is causing much disruption in the industry. The next step is Placeshifting, and I’ve decided I need to rise to this particular challenge in my TV viewing this year. We have multi-channel TV at home (no need to go into whose service it is because that’s not the point here) and we are lucky enough to spend a few weekends and some of the summer in an apartment we own in Southern France – I want to Placeshift my TV choices from the UK to my place in France. It’s early days but already I know it’s technically possible (I can install a Slingbox at home aand recieve the programming via Broadband on my PC in France) but how and when is it going to become easy and convenient? I want to watch it on a decent sized TV screen and that means I will need Fast Broadband (something I can’t rely on currently) and I will need to port what i recieve from Slingbox across to the TV (not exactly a convenient and easy user experience). So my challenge for 2008 is, will this become possible with a decent user experience and without a technical training course for the average punter?
I will be keeping my eyes on it!
Tags: advertising shift, downloading, online TV, online video, placeshift TV, streaming video, timeshift TV, VOD
