|
|
|
|
| Lean Forward video services: increasing convergence,
demand for interactivity, exploiting IPv6
I believe we are seeing important trends in the space where interactive and live video (including digitally generated cinema) need to be efficiently streamed, typically using H.264 to provide a user-satisfying video service, to mobile devices (mostly phones on 2.5G and 3G) and to PCs on the Internet. Increasingly -- for streaming live music and events, live 24-hour news services, highly interactive entertainment and security applications -- we see Lean Forward's array of interactive tools being used to generate a new "mode" or genre in the way that the younger generation uses converged access for compelling applications. Lean Forward I have described this as "Lean Forward video" many times, as this seems to sum up the behaviour at each extreme. What excites me about this is that demand supports the view; as soon as some "Lean Forward" is introduced into a video event, we see average revenue per user (the all important ARPU) increases dramatically.
Live music is a good example of this. Vemotion has the ability to stream live, with virtually no delay on broadband (typical latency on radio networks is unavoidable, but can be tuned down to a couple of seconds on systems such as GPRS); it also has the ability to "jump" between live streams almost instantly. So, rather than just provide the mixed output, Vemotion permits you to take several camera feeds from a stage, and offer the end customers the ability to switch between these feeds under their own control (simply by pressing 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), both on phones and on the Internet. The customer enjoys the experience of cutting his own experience, and the ARPU climbs rapidly. I am of the view that today's user wants to have Lean Forward entertainment on Lean Forward devices. Certainly our experience is that the exciting demographic group, the young big spenders, want Lean Forward entertainment. The same is true of applications designed for corporations, and even for government and military uses. For Lean Forward devices, the applications that leverage them best seem to enjoy universal success. "I Want It Now" vs. "I'll Take What I Can Get" Our experiences at Vemotion indicate we can add many of the possibilities
that IPTV conjures up (let's face it, today's "red button"
and set-top boxes are primitive We have done early work with some of the few directors who are producing digitally generated video. When we think about what's possible in the Lean Forward mode, we have to consider how people will come to regard video services. There will always be a percentage of events that are compelling enough to be acceptable on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. In reality, I believe perhaps we are seeing clustering of entertainment types:
I enjoyed Bill Kine's recent article on multicast support in IPv6 and applications (http://www.usipv6.com/6sense/2005/apr/05.htm), in which he discussed some of the impacts of unicast, multicast and broadcast over the v6 standard. I am acquiring some sense of the benefits that IPv6 should offer to Vemotion in carrying out its mission, and we've now successfully run encoders, servers and clients on IPv6 without much difficulty at all. Importantly, in view of the way that we're seeing demand for converged, increasingly "Lean Forward" entertainment moving, I believe we will increasingly see unicast, multicast and broadcast in use concurrently, and that customers will want applications which continually move from one to another. In the course of perhaps moving from the PC back onto the phone or PPC (Vemotion will follow them), the customer might well move from broadcast to multicast, to unicast, back to multicast, and so on, all in a very short amount of time, as the Lean Forward application demands. Keeping pace Vemotion has to ensure readiness for emerging technologies. There tends to be almost an overnight effect, from "one day" to "we need it now," so we tend to work well ahead. Smooth transition, segue and inclusion in the convergence demand that we have our technology, as well as billing and management, at a point of readiness well ahead of actual demand. 3G was a proving ground for this, where many operators had taken a "walled garden" approach and we provided innovative ways to bridge the unique challenges this caused. We believe we're ready and well placed for IPv6, and for IPTV, and we'll make sure we are for 4G. In essence, we find quite long "hybrid" periods, and we use a hybrid solution to provide smooth transition. Vemotion's strategy of operating a global, highly available, distributed architecture has helped in many respects. This approach enables us to generate parallel services which use different technologies simultaneously (which has in turn helped some large customers in a very real way), and manage the change as a capacity and re-use issue rather than as a Big Bang. Operators Vemotion remains agnostic and global. Our content providers demand the widest possible audience, and the ability to offer single-identity convergence between the Internet and the most prevalent device mankind has carried with him for a long time (our mobile phones). We have so far found a way to get to end-customers on pretty much any network. With some of the walled gardens and implementations of 3G, we have sometimes found this challenging, but the greatest challenges have been in billing or administration limitations within the operator. Our experiences would support the view that operator networks may be slow to proliferate IPv6. But if they constrain its use beyond acceptable boundaries, or simply move too slowly, other alternative-tariff (or even zero-tariff) technologies and connectivities will usurp them, as these will undoubtedly also be early adopters of IPv6 (or at least the ability to tunnel and provide end-to-end applications delivery). For more information, please contact: Tony Antoniou |
|
|
indeed compared to Vemotion interactive tool tunnels that can be operated
through video). How might the demand we're seeing reflect the way
that IPv6 offers significant improvement in providing P2P and B2C interactive
video services?
interactive tools (voting, limited participation).