It has been decided. Your use of telco services can be tracked, built into a profile and used to advertise to you. Everywhere you go on the internet and everywhere you take your mobile phone is data that operators can use to make money from you. It has been decided...

Sorry?

I am not a fundamentalist!
Regular readers will know that I am not a privacy nut. I don't believe in the stupid network, although I met its author David Isenberg over lunch on Tuesday at Telco 2.0 and found him to be a thoroughly absorbing, intelligent and genuinely nice fellow.

I was telling David how I think telcos can justifiably help the modern applications like Facebook, MySpace and WorldPay police the use of their services. My goal in such a theory is to protect legitimate users from sex pests, fraudsters and impostors - as outlined in my article on The Big Stick that telcos could use to "encourage" the adoption of their platform models.

Careering Down the Slippery Slope
Of course the problem is that with great power comes great responsibility. Little did I know that less than 3 hours after David and I parted, I would hear a presentation where this great responsibility has been totally ignored. This was not quite quite a slippery slope - it was more a slippery cliff edge.

The presenter detailed how his DPI equipment has been installed by a client for whom they log 36,000 events per second - today. They log everything that you do... I was left speechless, which was nothing compared to how I felt when another panelist brazenly stated that the privacy debate had happened already and that we had moved on.

By this point I was angry: this debate may have happened in a room full of personalised marketing specialists, but it has not involved Joe Public. To dismiss my concerns on the basis that I'm too late to have an opinion fundamentally misses the point that the user has been kept in the dark and the goalposts are moving rapidly as the capacity of technology to inspect, store and process increases.

It is like saying "it's rained enough", we'll have no more rain ever again on earth because Bangladesh is flooded.

False Justification
Apparently eight paedophiles in Italy have been arrested because of this vendor's DPI - tracked for sending MMS of abuse. No complaints here on that: this comes into the acceptable area as far as I am concerned, but the implication was that because the technology could do this amount of good, everything else they do was also permissible.

Sorry?

There is an ethical chasm between using DPI to address the evils that the internet has made possible, and using it to make money. For sure, there will always be a grey area, but what I heard was so dark that if right minded individuals heard it, they would recognise this as black.

Fobbing You Off
The data is not personally identifiable was another riposte. I disagree. There has to be a primary key and if all the data is being collected to develop adverts targeted at me, I don't think it matters whether they know me as Jeremy Penston, jpenston at ipdev dot net, 07733101607 or 82.69.75.210. The chances are that the database contains the lot anyway because most of it is in my email signature which will be read by the DPI every time I send and receive. If they couldn't identify me in some way, they couldn't target me - it doesn't matter what they call me, I'm still me.

My problem is not the targeting of adverts, it is the collection, storage and unknown manipulation of my profile in secret. Anyone who believes this is ok, I challenge you to go and talk to five of your friends (who don't work in telco) and tell them exactly how much is collected and why. If you can do so without feeling ashamed of what you believe in, then so be it, but I guarantee that most people in the street think that this only goes on in the NSA, MI5, Mossad and the FSB.

Perhaps your more clued up friends will know that Google could also be included in the above list but what the Big G sees of your usage is trivial compared to what your phone company does. At least until Google becomes a phone company...

Playing the Game the Right Way
Let me be practical. If you want to target adverts at me, then tell me what you are doing. Ask me permission at the time of use and give me something in return. Do not assume that because I told you where I live so that you can bill me, you can sell that same data to direct marketeers. Do not assume that because you know I just landed at Malaga airport on holiday, that you can send me an advert for a hire car. And, do not assume that because I gave you permission to use that data once, that I will always give you that permission. Does that sound fair?

I may sound like a Luddite, but the vast majority of the population knows nothing of what goes on inside the network. All I ask is that we be told what you know about me, how you would like to use it and what I will get in return so that I can decide whether to let you, ask you to delete it or change the bits that I feel are wrong.

We may not be as consumed by the need to remain anonymous as we were when Orwell wrote his stroll in the park. Social networks are proof that people want to share their lives with each other, but it is very dangerous to assume that because I share my life with my friends, that strangers can eavesdrop and use what they pick up to get inside my head. Do not assume that this debate has happened because Joe Public really has no idea of what is going on. Remember, the longest drought often ends with the mother of all thunderstorms.

Labels: privacy, targeted ads

[Permalink]

Following the recent two part series on personalised adverts, I thought it worthwhile grounding this into some sort of real life scenario. In spite of the references to Facebook, what I have written so far is pretty theoretical - networks could conspire with advertisers leaving you with little choice but to comply. Without grounding, you could be forgiven for thinking I'm off on one again.

The Birth of The Empire
As regular readers will know, I have occasionally highlighted Google's dark side. This is not because they have done anything to me personally - this is no vendetta. In fact, every time I have had cause to deal with them, they have done the job required quickly and more efficiently than any other product alternative. I almost exclusively use Google search and I am writing this on Google's Blogger service, after all!

My concern with Google surrounds how on the one hand they paint themselves as the white knight, defending the principles of the internet - freedom of speech, openness, ubiquity and so on - while on the other they continue to gather vast quantities of data about who I am and what I am interested in. There is a disconnect here for me between the PR values and the actions, primarily because the data is collected "secretly" and I have no clear way of reviewing it's accuracy or authorising its use.

Misdirection: The Access Network Wars
Perhaps I have just watched too much Star Wars, but I worry that we may wake up and realise that the battle we have been led into is part of a very different war from the one we thought we were fighting. It is a lot easier to think of Big Telco as the bad-guy because they are the ones that send you a bill every month and when things break, theirs is the more physical presence that is easier to see and therefore blame.

I just wonder whether this is actually the other way around. A desperate man can look like a mad man to most who see him... Of course I am biased towards Telco, that is where my history lies, so you should definitely apply a filter to what you read from me. Everyone has their own bias that they need to be aware of - including you.

Emergency Powers to Save the Internet
If Google wins the auction battle for 700MHz spectrum in January, they will be lauded by internet fundamentalists as the saviour of the net. They will undoubtedly deliver on their promises of a more open network for application innovation. This is not in dispute.

But saving the American dream? "This network will be a servant of America and not a master of our country's future". No, Google didn't say this, Frontline Wireless did. Frontline Wireless are nothing but a Lobbying Firm. They also added, "this election will determine is whether the wire-based internet remains open".

Please stop treating me like an idiot. Google are investing in a license for the same reason as anyone else would - to make money from it. Telcos have traditionally had different models, but Google's is that what they will receive in return for the license is a wealth of additional customer data that can improve their ad efficiency and hence what they can charge advertisers.

With Great Power Comes a Wealth of Data
Currently, Google does not know who I am. They just know me by my IP address and the profile they have of me is that I like to search for telecoms and internet news. If I was using Google Reader, they would be able to add a fair bit more - I am an Arsenal fan and I like cricket. I subscribe to BBC and Yahoo! news feeds, but I don't read them very regularly.

Consider then the additional information they would gather if they also provided my access. My IP address would be linked to my postcode, so they would have the full range of geo-demographics at their disposal.

They would know that I live in a five bed house in a village with two pubs and one curry restaurant. They would know that Tesco's and Waitrose are my supermarket choices and that I am more likely to be a Times reader than someone who reads The Sun. In fact, they would know an awful lot more than this, but I am not going to go into any further details because I don't know who is reading this. I don't want everyone to know who I am...

It was pointed out to me this week that if I have ever used Google Checkout (which I have, once), they may actually have this link already, but if they also provided my access there would be ever more about me that they could see.

A Very Slippery Slope
Because they would be providing my access, there would be nothing stopping them from collecting and analysing all my internet page requests - not just the search results and RSS feeds - but everything from my banking provider, who provides my electricity and so on and so on.

Where are the limits to what they can collect and what they can do? More to the point, who knows what they are collecting and what they are doing with it? Today there are clear lines demarcating access (with all the subscriber info coming from the address) and content.

Privacy Firewalls
Telcos already have access to the data described above, but this is not being collected, analysed and used for marketing purposes because that is not the Telco business model (today). The link between your IP address and your physical address currently held in trust by your service provider. This is a very important fact protecting your privacy.

It may well be that telcos decide to try and monetise this data too. If they did so, I would also expect them to be up front with their plans and what this means for your privacy. In fact I would expect this to be an opt-in model where you received a discount on service fees in exchange for agreeing to share your information.

Google's Business Case Needs Your Private Data
It is clear to me why Google are prepared to pay $4.6bn for the spectrum, but this is not to foster innovation on the internet. Google are not a charity and they can clearly see that personalisation of their ad model needs information that can only be determined from knowing who I am as a physical being. $4.6bn (plus another chunk for the network equipment) gives them this information.

The business case is simple: advertisers pay more to reach the people they want and only the people they want. Google's revenue grows so Google get the $4.6bn back with interest over the long term. My issue is that Google are not saying "we want the spectrum so we can find out who you are". If they were, would there still be so many avid supporters of a Google network?

Labels: 700MHz Spectrum, Google, targeted ads

[Permalink]

People don't like adverts. Ofcom's Communications Market Report states that 28% of people who record a programme on their DVR do so, at least in part, to fast forward through the adverts. Meanwhile YouTube adverts have been highly unpopular and have been pulled because users found a way to disable them.

This is a problem because the content needs to be funded. It is better because of technology, but that same technology can and is being used to find ways around the things that users don't like about a service - like paying for it.

Advertising can be very intrusive, but if it is to be a viable source of funding for networks, as described in the previous article in this series, we need to get over that problem. The solution, it is argued, is to make adverts personal to you and entertaining to you but in order to achieve this they need to know who you are.

Understanding the Audience
Knowing who you are and where you live will tell advertisers what products to pitch to you because your demographics tell them a lot about what you will and won't buy. Geo-demographics is already a highly refined part of the retail business. Technology offers people who want to sell to you the opportunity to reach out to you through your TV and internet experience.

The benefits to the retailer are clear - reach the customers you want, with a message that talks to them. Eliminate wastage by avoiding customers you can't reach with your stores and fill that airtime with stuff that is of interest to them. Not just brands, but products within brands - the A4, not the A8.

Let’s look briefly at geo-demographics. With data from one of the geo-demographic specialists, anyone can make a very good guess at what the visitor might want from them. How old? Status? Kids? House price? Finance? Loans? Newspapers? Mail order? Attitude to technology

Beyond Basic Demographics
Consider also the loyalty schemes like Clubcard and Nectar. These build up an incredible record of your buying habits and are already used by their owners in product promotions, but consider the opportunity to tie this in too.

Not just refined targeting of the brand, the opportunity is also there to target different products within the brand. Just like the vouchers you get today, consider the opportunity for Clubcard based ads on IPTV.

They will know that my family shop is normally on a Tuesday, so Monday night they can slot in a Tesco advert talking about Finest yogurts or some other luxury that we sometimes afford ourselves. A little gentle persuasion at the right time and bingo! Everyone is happy.

If their records show that we didn't shop today, they can quickly launch into a customer save by reminding me of how good their offer is and what we'd be missing if we went to Waitrose - you see, they also know that my options are limited by geography.

Full Data Sharing
Last week's article argued that by selling your identity and allowing advertisers to know who you are, you can pay, indirectly, for the networks needed to carry the next generation of content. Wastage can be eliminated and a share of the gains could go towards funding the construction of fibre.

Mobile operators are in even better shape when it comes to Mobile TV. They know the user within that household and can therefore be even more specific with what they promote - if we let them.

There is a slightly precarious changeover period as contracts would need to be redesigned and prices remodelled, but leaving that aside for the minute - could we triple revenue per viewer per hour and pay for Fibre to the Home for everyone?

A Controversial Conclusion
This subject has been in the back of my mind since the Telco 2.0 event in March. I was speaking to Chris Barraclough who had just completed his 'Telcos Role in the Advertising Value Chain' report. I was struck by slide 9 which showed the telecoms market to be worth more than 4 times as much as the Global Ad market.

The clear message was that operators should not bet on ads substituting their core revenues from voice, messaging and ringtones. Yes, online advertising will more than double between 2006 and 2010 but so what?

Consider it another way: online advertising will grow by $31bn in that time while core services will grow by $490bn. Even if the entire global ad market went online before 2010, it would only account for 18% of the total market at that point. The danger of dealing in percentages...

Based on these numbers, Chris' conclusion is the only sound one to draw. Even so, ever since then I have mentally challenged the conclusion on the basis that it does not feel right. It feels to me like it should be more equal than that and my perception has been enforced by the number of times I have read of Google's success.

The Danger of Thinking Too Big
I wonder whether or not we lose the trees for the wood in Chris' conclusion. "All" we need it to find £25bn or so of new money to fund the next generation network build. That's certainly more than most of us have in savings, but in comparison to the UK advertising market as a whole (£19bn in 2005, of which £4.8bn went to TV according to one source, although Ofcom's Communications Market Report says this is only £3.5bn) perhaps £25bn is not so frightening.

My thesis in a nutshell is as follows: targeting adverts means that less airtime is wasted and so advertisers will be prepared to pay more. I believe that properly used, we could see TV advertising revenue triple in an undefined period of time. Half of the benefit will go back to advertisers, the TV content producers and the rest, while the other half will generate the new revenue to back up the new investment in fibre to every home. There will be a 7 year ROI.

So we need £10bn a year of new ad revenues and we are there. Fibre for everyone! If we are prepared to sell our privacy...

The Heart of the Problem
I fear that the problem will come from the same people who believe that networks should be open and that content should be freely able to use them as they wish. I fear that the same lobby groups that do not want ISPs to charge extra for premium capacity, will similarly baulk at the prostitution of our identities.

There needs to be a logical debate about how to pay for networks. So far, it seems that people are still on whether to pay for them. It still amazes me that both industry propagates the unlimited* broadband myth. New money is required to pay for new consumption - it is as simple as that - and yet we still see the launch of video ads spun as a value added feature. One of the comments on YouTube's launch summed it up for me.

"To me this is more about honesty and fairness. It would have been fairer if you had said, 'we are doing this because we are in it to make money'. Or not done it at all."

Ethical Concerns
Ethically, the advertising solution is nowhere near as simple as I describe because in it I make no mention of protection against abuse of the data. Maybe this is 1984 after all, for we would be followed everywhere we went online and would have retailers peering through our virtual windows at the first opportunity. It might be happening anyway through the back door as applications like Facebook brazenly use your profile to target you.

At least today we are cloaked by our IP address or can choose not to use an application that may use "private information". We have to have a choice in this because we are selling who we are in the process.

Perhaps tying the IP address to our physical life is such a risk that the concept is a non-starter, but my guess is that if you offer people a discount if they opt-in, cash will win over ethics for most. I wonder though whether privacy can be effectively protected.

It is also possible of course that the bogeyman mentality will take over this argument as it did in debates over Network Neutrality.

Wrap Up
Somehow, we need to pay for the next generation network. Advertising is one option and it comes with the benefit that it can create genuinely new economic value. There is no substitution in anything I have described - the value comes from making markets more efficient and eliminating advertising waste.

But, and it is a very big but, we need to make sacrifices in order to realise the benefits. This is true in any model, but here the sacrifices are very much more complicated than simply paying more for the service.

By revealing who we are and allowing people who want to sell to us to reach us on a one to one basis, we are paying in kind for the services that we are consuming. This means you have to sell your identity. Are you prepared to do that?

Labels: IPTV advertising, targeted ads

[Permalink]

Would you sell your identity? Probably not if that meant people peering through your windows or being followed by CCTV everywhere you went, but I am not talking about Orwell's 1984...

I am interested in your identity because it is a hugely valuable reference point for advertisers that want to talk to you. The more they know about you, the more refined they can make their message to match your requirements, the more likely you are to buy their goods. Facebook for one, are already trying to exploit the opportunity.

Splattercast Advertising
In traditional media marketeers simply do not know who they are talking to or whether the intended audience is even tuned in to the adverts they place. This is particularly a problem for TV where the demographic refinement is severely limited. At best, they know the TV region and the programme playing at a given time, so they have to be general in their messaging and hope that the right people tune in to the show.

Some programmes are targeted at niches broad enough to help advertisers - football and beer immediately spring to mind - so Carlsberg for example, can talk to its potential audience in quite a specific way already.

It gets better in this example because the customer can actually be encouraged to consume the product there and then. Of course this works for other brands too whose products may also be in the fridge, but the bet is that next time you buy beer, you think Carlsberg.

Advertising Wastage
But even in this example, there is wastage - and I'm not referring to the dregs that some people always seem to leave in the can. There is a subset of the market that Boddingtons would like to reach and would be prepared to spend more to do so than Carlsberg. Carlsberg could get more bang for their buck too by being more specific with who they talk to. Shandy drinking southerners probably.

There are many sub niches within a broad market as this example shows, however badly. Targeting each of these niches individually, it is likely the sum of the parts is will be much greater than the whole. If brokers can break down the audience into its constituent niches and manage the growth in scope, they can charge advertisers more per viewer per hour.

IPTV Business Model Required
IPTV is the perfect platform for targeted advertising because of the ability to individually target consumption, but there is a business model problem facing the internet. Whichever way you look at it, there is investment required to grow the networks to cope with online entertainment and revenues are not growing to pay the bill.

This new money has to come from you - in the end only the consumer can pay. But this new money need not come directly in the form of a bigger broadband bill: advertising is one of a few examples of alternative approaches. This one needs your consent, but if it saved you £30 a month would you sell your identity to your ISP?

Why the ISP? Because they are the guardians of your internet identity. They have the missing link - they know both the postcode and the IP address of an individual user.

The Missing Link
When an internet content request is received, the website owner knows your IP address, can tell which pages you visited, links you clicked, how long you spent on a page but in terms of who you are, they can determine the network you are on and the country you are in but very little else. MaxMind for example, specialise in the geo-IP field and I use them some of my P2P geo-location analysis. The best they can do though when given my IP address is to say that I am a Zen Internet customer somewhere in the UK.

Of course Google add to this by building up a profile of you through your browsing history, search data and RSS feeds (if you use Google Reader). The problem here is that your internet habits often miss where you spend the majority of your money - on FMCG commodities - where brand and perception are the only real differentiators and where advertising plays the biggest role.

Hands up if you have seen a TV advert suggesting where to buy groceries. Keep your hands up if you have done a Google search for the best grocery store near you. My point is that internet searches are for unusual products, whereas advertising deals most with commodities.

If the advertiser can interrogate the ISP to determine the postcode to match a user's IP address they suddenly have the opportunity to really target adverts for these FMCG goods. They could serve back a set of adverts, specifically to that user for brands and products that are most likely to appeal. You win because you get the ads and the products you want. The advertiser wins for the same reason and the ad broker wins because he can charge more.

The Value of TV Ads
ITV in 2006 reported £1.28bn in advertising revenues. BARB viewing stats can be worked backwards to arrive at approximately 6.5bn viewer hours per year on ITV. Divide one by the other and you can see that ITV gets 20p per viewer per hour in ad revenues.

In the same period, Sky reported £342m ad revenues for approximately 2.1bn viewer hours. This gives a slightly lower figure for Sky of 16p per viewer per hour. Sky gets subscriptions on top of that of course. These are ballpark figures but it is a benchmark nonetheless.

Per household and excluding the BBC, you have around 17 hours of TV viewing per week. At 20p per hour that works out at around £14.50 per household per month.

New Advertising Revenues to Build Networks?
Just supposing that this works and targeting doubles the advertising spend by a given point in time. Assume the ISPs keep half the benefit for their contribution (£7.25 per month) and within 18 years you have more than £25bn NPV of accumulated value to the network industry. Enough to fibre every home in the UK, not just 90% of them...

In all likelihood, investors will look for a much faster return. At £14.50 per month extra to the networks, the £25bn NPV figure is hit in seven years. This is probably acceptable for an asset with an expected 10 year shelf-life before it too will require a further, if perhaps slightly less costly upgrade. To generate £14.50 extra per month for the networks, the effectiveness of adverts needs to triple as a result of the new capabilities. Is this possible?

The opportunity for advertisers increases dramatically because of the interactive rich media capabilities but in order to exploit the opportunity to target you, they need to know who you are. The technology is probably well capable of delivering on this promise, but are we prepared as individuals to sell our identities?

In Part II, we will be looking in more detail at what personalised adverts mean and some of the arguments against this as a means to fund the underlying networks.

Labels: IPTV advertising, targeted ads

[Permalink]

Sometimes, you see something so elegant and simple, you wonder why no-one thought of it before. An old colleague and regular visitor to this blog contacted me the other day to advise me to check out Arootz - and I'm very pleased he did.

A Relative Unknown
I wish I could claim an exclusive, but I can't. They have been in BusinessWeek & the Jerusalem Post already but it appears that the point was lost on most people. There are only 53 blog entries on the company, the vast majority seeming to repeat BusinessWeek verbatim while most of the rest focusing on the fact that the company raised some cash recently.

One article I found does add some value, commenting on the BusinessWeek piece rather than just repeating it - more questions than answers, concluded Businessofvideo.com - and I agree with that part at least, but perhaps Mr Rayburn had a lot on that day because he didn't actually ask the questions. I have asked the questions - I contacted Arootz and their CEO replied with a significant amount of detail - and having looked into it, I have to disagree with the negative thrust of what Dan says.

Old Technology, New Ideas
It is true that multicast has been around for ten years or more. I know, I was at UUNET 10 years ago when UUcast was being hyped and developed in parallel. As with most other attempts to use multicast, that product failed to find a market because in the end, all it was doing was replacing broadcast and as we all know, if something isn't broken...

Multicast has again come back into people's thinking recently as IPTV services have been rolled out using the technology for the linear (live viewing) portion of what they offer. The problem there remains that multicast has not catered for timeshift behaviour. If you want on-demand, IPTV has to unicast and that means that you use a whole stream all to yourself.

I was discussing this problem with an eminent industry architect back in April at the ISP Forum event - his suggestion was staggercast, which effectively means a multicast stream of a programme being distributed every N minutes, much like Sky's multistart service for prime time movies. It was a definite improvement on multicast / unicast combinations already in use, but doesn't really tick that on-demand box.

Businessofvideo.com is also correct in highlighting that personal storage has also been around for ever. Quite right, it has, but what Arootz has done is combine this with multicast so that the network sees one stream and yet everyone gets a copy that they can watch what they want on demand. It's a mashup of two very well understood technologies and that is the simplicity that I refer to in my opening statement.

The Solution in a Nutshell
In summary, there are 3 elements - Distribution Servers where the content owner injects content, a Multicast enabled network and a set of user Multicast-2-Storage (M2S) agents sitting on PCs or STBs. Arootz sells this CDN as a managed service to content owners and works with the ISPs to make sure that multicast is turned on over the network. I'll come back to the web of relationships later in the article, but I will focus first on the service piece.

Targetted Adverts
My initial reaction was: ok, sounds good they've dealt with on demand but if you are multicasting, you miss the personalisation capability that must be at the centre of IPTV to make it a step beyond broadcast. Erm no, they've thought of that.

"The ads are delivered to storage ... based on the advertising targeted parameters, the decision which ad to show is targeted individually (based on a doubleclick server somewhere) and then the ad is inserted in real time into the video stream but since it comes from storage, it is fast, high quality and real time." Arootz's CEO Noam Bardin.

That's clever - the media and the ads are delivered separately and reassembled to create the final, personalised media file...

Navigating Uncharted Waters
What about navigation and finding what you want among the wealth of possibilities?

"We allow users to subscribe to RSS like feeds from a variety of sources ... We provide interfaces for preference engines to assist in selection of content such as 'the highest rated channel based on yesterdays actual viewership' or 'all content with the word Shark somewhere'" (Shark is of course an example of something you might be interested in.)

Hmm, I like that too. This is the elegance - mashing up social networking, RSS and an EPG into something that can cope with the huge volumes of content...

Huge Volumes of Content
Arootz estimates that the average user consumes 125GB of content per month. Obviously it depends on resolutions: it might be a fair bit less than that for standard definition TV, but if we were talking about 1080p, we could be looking at four times that figure. Is 500GB a lot of data? I think that depends on whether you are a unicast network or a hard-drive.

Terabyte drives are the basis for Arootz's business model and that starts to explain why you have not seen this model previously. Storage has always been far too expensive to make plans like this work but Arootz reckons that by 2010, you will be seeing cost effective drives offering 5 Terabytes... At this point, the limitation is back on the network.

Multicast takes care of the core network capacity issue because as with caching models I have discussed previously, each media file need only be sent once to each exchange and not once per user as with unicast delivery. This saves many thousands of identical 2Mbps plus streams and brings us back and the point where the bottleneck is again the physical speed of the local loop.

Use Case Example
While Arootz claims that its service only uses off-peak capacity, this is a configuration option that can easily be changed. The idea is that you watch live TV via the live multicast feed. If you are not watching (or are watching and have some spare network capacity), other programmes are sent down to you and stored on your machine. You pull these up on demand.

Of course you can't download the entire programme catalogue. Lets say there's 10 channels that make up your regular viewing, you can't even download everything on each of those unless you have a very very very fast connection. Choosing which programme to download (because you might want to watch it) is the job of the M2S AI agent.

The question then becomes whether the AI is good enough to make sure that the file you want is already on your hard drive when you come to watch it. Backing that up, there's the fall-back unicast option in the event that you are feeling a bit wacky today. It looks like it might hold together.

You might even find that the model allows you to escape some of the shackles of the local loop speed as it allows you to watch delayed feeds at 720p (6.4Mbps) even though your line may only just be good enough for 480p (2.5Mbps). A 2.5Mbps connection maxed out enables you to receive something like 800GB per month. For 720p content you need the AI to give you a 40% hit rate (you watch 25 hours a week, it downloads 65 hours that you "might" be interested in).

So Far, So Good
Arootz links multicast with storage and adds personalised RSS subscription with targeted advertising. Sounds good so far doesn't it? The software assets they have are clearly well thought out and fill a growing need. But what about the issues?

The weakness of the Arootz model is that it requires each link in the chain to be working in harmony. The content distributor must plant the content on the CDN, the ISP needs to multicast the channels and the PC or STB hardware requires the M2S software to take advantage of the storage and run the channel selection process.

Conflicts in the Supply Chain
These three parties are not exactly in cahoots. The interests of content and network are juxtaposed and that led to the Network Neutrality issues of 2006. Sitting uncomfortably with a foot in each camp are the hardware companies. Only Sky, with assets in each area following their acquisition of Amstrad last week, seem remotely aware of the need to align the interests of the players in the supply chain.

Although Arootz has an elegant solution to the video unicast problem, they need all elements in the chain to see it and play along to make it work. Without any one element, it breaks down. If they work together, everyone wins. So who is pulling it through so that the vision becomes a reality? As with other efforts to bridge these gaps, is it a question of chicken or egg?

"Look at it differently – if you believe (and I do) that most of video is going to be consumed off IP networks then there is a scaling problem with the current technologies. This scaling is quality, cost and technical. The main bottleneck is the network and our solution is the only cost effective way for this to happen. It may not be us but it will be multicast based. Just like internet advertising was dead in 2001, premium content would never go online in 2005 – Multicast will have to rebound because unicast cannot scale to deliver the cost/quality we expect." Noam Bardin again.

I agree with everything he says there, but it doesn't really answer the question. What is the incentive for each party to play ball? I think the answer is actually much more simple.

Cash. Cold, Hard Cash.
The commercial model is that content owners pay Arootz either as a straight arrangement or as an advertising revenue share. Simple enough so far, but in parallel, they are selling to ISPs.

"Our offer to them is 'let us accelerate your content on your network such as VOD, Internet TV and other components'. We will then wholesale the access to 3rd party content owners and provide them with a revenue share back so that they get more content distributed on their networks, more efficient distribution (less load), they get a slice of the action and thus are part of the value chain, unlike P2P where they carry the cost but are not part of the upside."

Aha! Someone is taking the bull by the horns and putting in place a way to route the money so that the networks open up and get paid for carrying content. It would be easy to think that the netcos should be happy with cost savings, and try and keep the distribution fees to themselves, but this statement above all the others shows that Arootz is pragmatic and understands that a virtuous circle needs to start somewhere. And the hardware?

"It can be embedded in software or hardware, it provides distribution and targeted advertising capabilities" and "we are not the brand"

Where Next?
As with every small company, there are a million things that can go wrong as larger and better funded alternatives try and achieve the same thing. That said, the technology that Arootz has and the pragmatic approach shown by their commercial model is an excellent starting point.

Channels to markets (they are in many) still threaten to derail the company as putting together the video supply chain involves dealing with some very heavy hitters. It may require the sponsorship of one of these big players to get the ball rolling, but this is a solution where without compromises, everyone wins. Worth keeping an eye on...

Labels: Arootz, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, ISP Products, next generation networks, targeted ads, timeshift TV, video on demand

[Permalink]

We are now onto part 4 in our little mini series. In part 3, Keith described our Technical Operations and Engineering set up. Seeing as we are making this up, I could ensure this is staffed with enough resources to enable me to develop what until now, has been a very meet-too product set.

LUI tries to be very simple for its customers. We don't differentiate on speed - we just give everyone as much capacity as their line can handle - and we bundle together all the components that we provide into one of two (soon to be three packages). We are planning a fourth bundle including IPTV for "early 2008" - which as you know is industry code for August.

So what we have at the moment (Bundle 1 and Bundle 2) are pretty basic. The bundles include components which I will describe below, but in essence, Bundle 1 is our basic internet access service, while bundle 2 includes our voice services alongside that connectivity.

Bundle 3 is where we are trying to stand out. It wraps in some basic social networking components because as a local ISP, with all the associated scale disadvantages that Keith talks about, we need to exploit what is otherwise a weakness. We are going to be pivoting our future development around this community philosophy.

Being small means we can be local and we can be a part of the community. Until we launched Bundle 3, that just meant that our customer normally had a friend of a friend working here - and most of our signups have been via our rewards scheme. Now we are going to try and exploit that local community feel that we have that our larger, national competitors cannot hope to match.

In fact, Bundle 3 in many ways replaces Bundle 2. Bundle 3 customers must have the voice services and they don't have to pay any extra to get Bundle 3 in place of Bundle 2 because we make our money in other ways. Bundle 3 is where we start to make money from revenue share and advertising deals, which although they won't allow us to offer a free access product for the forseeable future, certainly looks necessary to mitigate the scale disadvantages we face.

The added components in Bundle 3 give us something "rich" to give away for free to encourage people to take up our boring old voice products. In summary the Bundles consist of the following components, which are defined in detail below:

Bundle 1 = components 1 + 2 + 4
Bundle 2 = components 1 + 2 + 3 + 4
Bundle 3 = components 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5

Bundle 3 will also include components 6 or 7 (depending on customer niche) and bundle 8 when these components are ready. Our IPTV Bundle 4 is still in the planning stages and will be the subject of article 6, back here on ipdev.net, next week.

Unconstrained by the dramas involved in actually delivering all this, we can be highly idealistic in our product set. Having been there on the inside doing product development, you don't know how good it feels knowing that all the resources you need will be there at the meetings and will deliver on their commitments ;-)

Component 1 - Secure, Managed Internet Access
LUI is an internet access provider. Without that element of its product the service is nothing, so we have to get that right. Getting it right means no hidden charges or reduced quality if the customer actually uses the connection. We don't want to stop that because it is the future, so there are no caps, fair use policies or traffic management.

Getting it right also means that our services get delivered to customers through a managed gateway router. In theory, we hand off to the customer via eithernet or wifi, although of course things are never as simple as that - we know that you often need to help customers connect their equipment to the network if they are ever to use either the equipment or the network.

That managed router that we ship to the customer site provides full wireless, firewall and parental control functionality which we manage for them based on templates in our configuration database. The customer thinks that they are getting a specialised service because it is managed but in fact they are getting the same as everyone else. It's an old trick that has worked in the business market for years now and consumers are ready for it. Plus TR069 has made it all affordable to implement.

Component 2 - Content Filtering
There is a lot of bad stuff on the internet. Rather than hiding from that fact and hoping that the mud doesn't stick when politicians raise the subject, LUI is being proactive. We automatically block the IWF's watch list.

We are not judge and jury, but we accept our role policing the "rules" laid out by those in authority because to not do so would destroy our ethical, community based business philosophy. This is over and above a strong adherence to industry standard "notice and takedown" procedures. This means that when content deemed illegal by the authorities and residing on our network is notified to us, we take it down or block it immediately.

There is also a lot of stuff that although not illegal, many would prefer to avoid. For them we offer a service on the managed gateway router that filters content as determined by the customer's profile settings. Our customers have found this to be a better way of dealing with the problem than client software based services as the main offenders are teenagers with far more technical ability to bypass controls than most parents have to implement them.

All the parent needs to do is call us and we will (upon verification of their identity) implement controls on the router for them that their not-so-angelic offspring cannot touch. We also offer browser plugins for younger internet users and training materials for parents that create age-appropriate walled gardens for them to use safely.

Component 3 - Voice
Because we offer internet access, we decided a while back to bundle CPS voice and in 2006 also added Line Rental as an option for customers taking broadband. That was very successful on the revenue front, but caused us no end of headaches on the cost side of the equation especially with regard to Billing something that we never had a problem with before as our data bundles were simple fixed monthly prices.

When we unbundled, we were forced to keep the voice on CPS and use Shared MPF instead of full unbundling because we did not want to deal with rolling out a softswitch at the same time as everything else.

Keith is going to go into much more detail on the voice network and its commercials in part 5 back on Telebusillis...

Component 4 - Core Second Level Services
No self respecting ISP goes to market without the basic second level services: mail and web space. Rather than build these from scratch, we chose to outsource these from day 1 of our existence, which has given us a huge boost in terms of ever more advanced features coming out in quarterly releases from our supplier. These started off with basic AS/AV facilities but quickly grew with the addition of web mail, SMS alerts and more recently hosted exchange.

Where the internally developed versions of our competitors may have been easier to get up and running (and no doubt are much cheaper to run), our managed mail service has been getting better and better while theirs looks ever more tired.

The same is true on the web space side. That too was outsourced which meant that our customers now have had ever-growing space allowances and the ability to purchase and simply integrate domain names with their FTP space. Where some of our competitors are stuck in time, our outsource partners are helping us to develop a range of Web 2.0 services for our customers. If we'd had to develop all this internally, it would never have reached the top of the priority list and we would be stuck in the 1990s.

Component 5 - Web 2.0 Photo Services
We launched this not long ago. Well... to be fair, we "announced the intention to launch" these not long ago, but that seems to be the way the game is played. The city certainly liked it anyway, but then they don't have time to figure out that actually what we said is that we are taking pre-registrations for the next wave of products. They will surely ask how we are doing next time, but we can always give them a "too soon to tell" response if we aren't quite there yet. The Chairman was happy anyway, so that's all that counts.

Anyway, what we announced was that we were going to bundle in a Photo Blogging upgrade that our hosting partner is developing. The Photo Blog comes with a full online backup solution that will allow our customers the peace of mind that their treasured pictures are safe from the dreaded PC crash. They can also create public and virtual private albums allowing them to share their snaps with others.

One of the most exciting elements of this component is that our partners have bundled in Microsoft's Photosyth application into their service. This means that our customers public photos will be stitched together to build a tapestry of Leeds that will grow as more and more photos are posted. We think that this will really encourage our users to post their shots of Leeds onto our service and get them coming back for more, as the community builds a 21st century photographic record of the city in our time.

Another neat extra feature around the Photo Blog is the Photo Printing service. Again, our partner is doing this for us but we are set to get a 25% cut of any printing fees that they charge to our users and it will all be billed through our systems boosting total revenue growth numbers which should be nice.

Component 6 - Web 2.0 Social Networking Services (Locals)
Here we plan a big push in 2008. We are preparing to launch a set of partner delivered services that build upon the local communities in our catchment.

For Leeds residents we offer a set of social networking services, on the Leeds Community Channel. We are partnering with local media to deliver news, sport and current affairs bulletins that users can take part in to through the next generation of the Photo Blogging service, due out in Q2 2008. The local media is embracing user generated content and mashing itself up with local community and social services to provide a wide array of localised information and entertainment for Leeds residents.

Leeds businesses will be able to target their services at the Leeds Community Channel through BT Tradespace. Here, consumers will be able to find merchants, tradesmen or special interest groups that are local to them, visit their blog, read reviews by other customers and find recommended suppliers.

We considered launching our own copy-cat service in place of BT's Tradespace, but realised that we would be diluting our marketing by addressing consumers and businesses. Furthermore, businesses have requirements that could quickly escalate beyond what we are able to provide on a production basis.

All this is ad-funded and LUI is set to receive a 15% share of ad revenues on the community channels whether these ads are placed via the traditional media, via online agencies or through Tradespace. This is all gravy for us as all we need to do is provide access to our customer's internet usage data to allow advertisers to build and target specific profiles that improve their click through rates. Our privacy policy says we can, unless the customer checks the box when they sign up and agrees to pay higher access charges instead.

Component 7 - Web 2.0 Social Networking Services (Students)
For university students, we have struck a deal with Facebook to create every subscriber to the student package an account on that network. Facebook liked the way that we were able to bulk pre-provision the sign up and initial data entry of the customer's basic information (name, address, email, student ID etc) from our billing records.

We are working with the Universities in Leeds to align with their social and sporting groups, which they love because provides each interest group with their own site for their members. In exchange for all this free stuff that the Student Union gets, we get a very high profile during freshers week and mitigation against payment default by SU members. We are planning a beta launch of this when term starts in September for a small number of computer oriented societies - let's see how this goes...

Of course, we appreciate that these students are transient, so we have had to think hard about contracts, payment terms and guarantees. Most of them have 12 month lets on their houses or residencies which we are aligning with by working with the letting agents. In many cases, the default is that the rented property already has our service installed and the agents actually collect the money on our behalf as part of the rental fees. Every time a new resident moves in, the agent notifies us and they get paid a commission.

For the individuals themselves, their facebook profile needs to be detachable from our service when the individuals move onwards and upwards and leave Leeds at the end of their studies. We are laughing however, having agreed a 5% share of ad revenues, not just in year 1, but as long as the user has the facebook account that we created for them.

Component 8 - User Generated Video
We are going to keep this discrete from Video on Demand or IPTV. The difference being mainly that User Generated Video runs on a flash enabled web browser, while IPTV runs on the family room television set. VoD sits somewhere in the middle across both PC and TV platforms as a jack of all trades.

Once we have the Photo Blog services established we will build around that Video Blogging capabilities. This is likely to take us in two directions - mobile phone footage and video camera productions.

Mobile phone footage is a simple step up from the Photo Blog, quick and easy to post and share. This is great for contributions to news and sport media as well as within closed user groups. We should have this up at the same time as the Social Network upgrades in Q2 2008.

Video Camera Productions are much more complex as they require significant editing and we are looking for tools to help our customers process and create professional looking media and integrating that with the network and the private sharing facilities. We are preparing an RFP from various industry leaders to start the development of this, although it means that we may not go to market until the end of 2008 or even the beginning of 2009.

We strongly believe that there is a future here to be considered. Many people make film of their children that they would like to share with relatives but would be terrified of falling into the wrong hands. Our service will implement digital fingerprints onto user generated media so that only people that the user says can view their films, can see what they have produced.

On the other hand, these films may offer an alternative to mainstream media. DIY Productions Ltd might have a talent, but no route to market. We will provide one because they can upload their work for viewing on an unrestricted basis, potentially supported by advertising that we broker for them.

In order to prevent this sharing capability being abused for copyright infringement, the service will build in copyright detection software. We have to do this or we are toast...

Component 9 - IPTV
Don't look for this on the web site today. This is another project that won't be available, even on private beta until 2009, but IPTV offers us a huge opportunity. We are going to be well placed to promote, sell and install (remotely) the glue that holds the internet and the TV together: the IPTV network operating system and the set top box.

IPTV is also a major threat to us from a networking perspective because if we don't do it we won't be able to control traffic costs, so we are prioritising this for two reasons: to add value and to mitigate costs. Right now we are evaluating the best way forward. Part 6 of the series, which will be back here, will look at our considerations in this area.

Labels: ISP Products, LUI, Photosynth, targeted ads

[Permalink]

"What Joost is - a ... high quality ad-supported ... secure ... cost-effective delivery platform." Mike Volpi, officially now the new Joost CEO.

The edit is mine (you can read the full interview at GigaOM), but Volpi seems very clear that they are a platform for content owners first and foremost.

Since I first tried the service, I have held a certain amount of scepticism about whether Joost is really the consumer-play that some might believe it to be (like Skype, is it the centre of the experience?) My scepticism surrounds the fact that although you "buy" Joost, and you see the Joost interface, Joost is not really why you are there. You are there for the content. Unlike how you Google a word or you Skype someone, you don't Joost a TV programme.

Janus Fris on his blog, describes Joost as meaning "great quality Internet TV". That was back in January, when the Venice Project became Joost, so perhaps this evolution towards a service provider model shows how they have refined the concept over the last 6 months since its early Beta testing days.

The big success of these tests has been the P2P network by all accounts. I have seen this in the improvements between the two snapshots I have taken of their peer hit ratios (in April and then about 6 weeks later in May). My tests suggest that between 5 and 10 peers is enough (at current resolutions, which are poor) to take the load off the Joost Level3 hosted servers. In other words, it won't be long before the bulk of distributed content is an optional (performance enhancing) cost to the company.

I wonder whether Joost is actually more of a technology-play (the Intel inside model or even operating behind the scenes as the internet equivalent of SES Astra and Eutalsat birds to deliver Sky TV and others)?

Those comments from Volpi increase my suspicion that Joost sees itself as the latter, but is hedging its bets and getting itself off the ground by acting as the former. Perhaps Volpis experience at Cisco is telling also: "Most recently, he headed the company's $11 billion division that builds network equipment for telecom companies and network providers", Total Telecom.

Is the company going to take on Sky as a multi-channel "channel" or will it link up with the Murdochs as a delivery partner for Sky Sports? The comment from Volpi on Apple TV (a tie up that I think would be a mutually beneficial move), seems to indicate that Joost might well be preparing itself to act as the aggregator network and not the retailer.

In that position in the market, Volpi's background with Service Providers might again be highly relevant. He is better placed than most to diplomatically (and technically) solve network bandwidth issues by working with the major networks to minimise traffic tromboning. He knows network providers and he knows networks. He was at Cisco...

By controlling the distribution platform, Joost is in prime position to adopt the responsibility to aggregate and target the adverts to individual users. Joost will know far more about each of its users' preferences than will a dumb broadcaster (without the internet uplink), so they will inevitably be able to get more £s per user per second of airtime than would Sky or others. For sure, the content-co will get a large share of revenue and may even get more than they do today because the ad value will be so much higher.

Two words for anyone who thinks that being a wholesale platform is a low margin business: Bill Gates. Is Joost an application or is it a potentially ubiquitous operating system...?

Labels: IPTV advertising, Joost, next generation networks, targeted ads

[Permalink]

About a month ago, I undertook a small project to evaluate a couple of visitor stats packages so that I could get a better idea of what readers wanted from this blog. I am not going to produce anything as wide ranging as can be found on conversionrater.com, but seeing as I went to the trouble of comparing a few of the bigger ones back to back, it is worthwhile summarising my findings.

Quite what use this will be to you (unless you too write a blog), I have no idea. This might just be an example of how you get what you pay for (nothing), but I will try and throw in some wider observations to keep you entertained along the way, even if you don't much care for stats. You might be interested in how much information about you is left every time you go through a site...

I started the blog with partial feeds - giving prospective readers the chance to choose whether to read on. A click through is then a hit and I know I should write more like that, but it puts a lot of emphasis on writing a good headline and succinct opening statement.

I started off with StatCounter. Like all the other options, I have to install a small amount of code on your web page which then contacts the StatCounter server and tells it your IP address, the page you are accessing, the page you came from and any internal hyperlinks you click through on the page. It also captures the times of all these events and stores all this information in a log file.

The size of this log file is determined by how much you pay them. You buy a certain limit which is then stored on a rolling basis, dropping the oldest record to store the next one. You used to get 100 lines for free, but this has just gone up to 500 lines stored as a way of hooking you into their service. The problem is that the rate for additional storage goes up quite quickly after that, although this has also been improved in the recent package upgrades.

StatCounter doesn't just give you the logs, although these are also available to you if you want to process the data yourself. One of the good bits about StatCounter is that it gives you a predefined set of queries that you can really use and tell you who your visitors are, where they are coming from and where they are going to. It is in the depth of readily available information about individual visitors - the drill-down - that StatCounter excels. The Visitor Paths query shows me your IP address, your network provider, the page you came from and any search strings you brought with you, the pages you read on this site and any links clicked through to other pages on this site. Unlike a few of the other services though, StatCounter does not register clicks to links on my pages, which take you off this site.

One of two individuals even leave their name in the logs, presumably because they use a fixed IP which is recorded in their name. Instead of a network provider's name, I can actually see the name of the individual. I'm sure Martin Geddes won't mind me picking on him as an example. Scary, isn't it...?

It was therefore no surprise when my readers started asking for full post feeds. It is a lot more convenient for the reader and it hides their identity behind a Bloglines account number or the equivalent. A lot of readers like to lurk - it's human nature - I can understand that, but I wonder if they consider the even greater level of information they give Bloglines or whoever about who they are and what they like across a multitude of sites. I'll wager a small side bet that these reader services get very good, very quickly at targeted advertising...

Anyway, so I went to full post feeds but I wanted to keep track of the articles that people were reading so that I could write more of the stuff they wanted and less of what they didn't. With full post feeds, readers don't need to come by the site so you don't get a hit on StatCounter. The log files are useless: the number of requests for the RSS feed is misleading because aggregator poll your server every so often counting as a hit whether or not you deliver any new content.

So I set about trying to use Feedburner.

I quickly realised that the level of basic information about my feed in the free service is not enough. That just tells me how many subscribers I have, not how many of my articles get read. For me, this was like a chocolate teapot (useless), so I had to upgrade to the Total Stats Pro service where this information is available.

Even so, I am not in love with the level of information you get, so now that I am paying $4.99 a month, I am questioning it. The problem I have is that although I like the StatCounter (and Google) services much more, Feedburner is the only service I have come across allows me any view at all of how many feeds get read. Even so, there is no way of knowing how many feeds get "read" by clicking "mark all as read" versus how many are actually read (nor do I get the time taken to read that you get if the pages are on your own server).

I have considered removing Feedburner, but doing so would mean either a return to partial feeds or giving up any view of the relevance of the content that I am producing for regular subscribers. It strikes me though that full vs partial feeds is one of the major differences between old new media (The Register) and new new media (GigaOm). With old new media, they are the aggregator. With new new media, you are. Purely for audience tracking purposes, headlines, snippets and click throughs would certainly be my way of choice, but this is new new media, so your full post feeds are safe.

Feedburner also give you the standard web site analytics option, but to be honest I don't use this very much because it is second rate compared to the others in the sample. The interface not nice looking, and not user friendly. But it is free, but then so is Google's Analytics...

I will probably hold off cancelling Feedburner until Google add the ability to track RSS feeds to their otherwise excellent package. I'm sure it will come, it is the one big hole in what they offer.

I signed up to Google just before the enhancements to what is still a Beta package but I already have a hugely impressive array of reports. The USP here are certainly the graphs and the look, which are lovely. Soft on the eye and really informative - very 2.0 chic. If you are an artsy type, Google is definitely for you.

The dashboard is really very good and affords the ability to drill down into the same level of detail as StatCounter, albeit without quite the same clarity of intent. With Google I still find myself somewhere and think, "oh yes, that's interesting", without being entirely clear on what slice of data I am looking at or how I got there.

There is one big advantage for Google over StatCounter. Google is free no matter how big you are, as far as I can see... They have yet to ask me for a penny, but then this site is just a tiddler so I don't know for sure what they do if you hammer them, but there doesn't seem to be a limit on records stored.

I'm sure Google makes money somewhere, but as with all Google services, the user doesn't pay - the advertiser does. This is how Google is making money from analytics. The service not only provides the hit reports as do the others but it allows you to build in goals (benchmarks) and track how you are doing. It hooks you in and allows you to hook in ad-word campaigns. Clearly Google sees analytics and a way to get people thinking about ad-words when they are thinking about how to get more visitors. Stunningly simple, but probably very effective.

The other one I tried was Clicky. This is another one with a very nice looking interface. In fact it is probably even more 2.0 than Google, but Clicky doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same summary to drill down capabilities that Google or StatCounter have. One upside is that Clicky "integrates" with Feedburner, essentially allowing you to suck your Feedburner data into the Clicky interface.

I have however, found this to be a better idea than an implementation as there seems to be a number of design and technology issues there. For example, the Item Views that I get with Total Stats Pro from Feedburner seem not appear reliably in Clicky and the view of the Feedburner data is very one dimensional without drill down capabilities. The records I can analyse are only available one day at a time...

So where does that leave me? If I was just going for one interface, I would have to for the all-round averageness of the Clicky product, or the somehow unsatisfactory Feedburner service. This is because, as I have already mentioned, I need to track the full post feeds that I issue.

It is however much better to be using all of them in combination right now because you can draw more conclusions (and iron out the many slightly contradictory messages) if you can invest the time to look at all the data side by side. This is because none of the services meets my needs. My ideal would have the Google Dashboard and log size constraint (none), the StatCounter drill down and (a better version of) Feedburner's read item stats.

Greedy aren't I...?

Labels: blog analytics, Clicky, feedburner, Google Analytics, StatCounter, targeted ads

[Permalink]

Ten days ago, quite unexpectedly, my wife had a baby. Of course, I knew she was pregnant, but the little guy wasn't due until the end of May so we weren't ready - I'd managed to paint the ceiling of his room, but not the walls. He didn't have anywhere to sleep or any clean clothes to wear. It was all a bit chaotic, as I'm sure you can imagine.

All's well that ends well, but all this meant that I was unable to write anything last week as my job suddenly became Chief Entertainer for our two year old son. They say that it's easier the second time around and they are right - looking after a newborn is infinitely easier than looking after a two year old...

On Monday night this week I got a bit of time to myself. Not much, but between 8pm and 9pm I managed to catch a bit of telly. Fortunately for me, there was not one, but two programmes that I wanted to watch. Unfortunately for me, we don't have a Sky+ box and my old VHS recorder let me down badly when I tried to tape the Australian Grand Prix a few weeks back so I have consigned that to history. So I had to make a choice: did I want to watch Panorama's programme on Scientology or Dispatches' character assassination of our next Prime Minister, Gordon Brown?

Again, last night (Tuesday), I had an hour to myself. A precious hour. An hour I had worked hard for all day. But what was on? Nothing!

(Strictly speaking, that's not true as I have hundreds of channels, but there was nothing there to float my boat and I ended up watching Hugh Grant's truly dire American Dreamz on Sky's Comedy Movie Channel)

So one night I miss something I would like to watch and the next I'm forced to watch Hugh Grant pretending to be Simon Cowell because there's nothing else on.

"A sample of one", said an industry expert when I described my problem to them. "The best thing about television is that it is not interactive", and while I agree with them to a point, I can't help feeling that what I experienced last night (not for the first time on a Tuesday night by the way), would be enough to convince me to go for a genuine time-shifted / catch-up TV service. Given how precious my time is now, I would be willing to pay for it too - on a subscription basis, not pay-per-view as the last thing I want to do after reading The Gruffalo for an hour is to analyse whether watching X is worth £Y.

So why don't I get a PVR? Jolly good question that - maybe I should - but I can't help thinking that this just adds one more problem to my already busy life. A PVR requires planning and foresight which is something most people with kids are short of at 8pm. For sure, I would have been able to watch Lewis Hamilton's debut in Melbourne a couple of months back because I would have set the thing to record (as I tried to with the VHS), but you don't often get a programme like that, that you know you are going to miss and want to watch enough to get off your backside to do something about.

I am talking about that veg out time. That precious hour, when you really don't want to think "if only I'd set the PVR last night", when it would be so much easier just to go "back" through the programme guide and find something, anything, better than is on offer right now.

If you are the BBC, ITV or C4, making quality programmes, why do you want to restrict your audience to those that happen not to have anything better to do when your work is aired? Don't you think that more people would actually watch your stuff if they could do it on their own terms. Maybe they would watch less imported tosh and maybe Sky have more to lose than gain from on-demand?

Clearly, the BBC and C4 are with me on this. The iPlayer is horribly caught up in bureaucracy, which is a shame because the BBC have most to offer when it comes to quality programmes. C4's 4oD is available now, so as part of my research into this article, I have caught up on the half hour or so of the Dispatches programme that I missed when I switched over to Panorama on Monday.

The quality of the 4oD download was good. The file was 348 MB for 48 minutes of film, which is very slightly under 1 Megabit per Second. Interestingly, it was 48 minutes because the 1 hour broadcast had been stripped of the adverts - which I consider peculiar in the extreme. Surely, here is a great vehicle for ads to help pay for the service provision. Although, with the ability to fast-forward in the current media player, you might not expect people to watch them...

So I watched the re-run of Dispatches on my PC and as I worried about whether my country was going to end up with a control freak as its next leader, I also considered some research that I had seen from CacheLogic into online video watching habbits. Was I happy with watching TV on my PC? Yes, but it was "during my lunch break": I would not want to do this at 8pm during my precious hour of veg out time. I didn't last night... I watched Hugh Grant "acting" the twit instead.

The picture quality was equivalent to broadcast TV (and better than Joost, which runs at around 700kbps). You have to download the 4oD application which has an embedded Ioko Kontiki P2P client, which obviously aims to spread the distribution burden.

I checked my download with Wireshark (fka. Ethereal) and found that over 90% of the data was coming from Ioko's own network, indicating that the seed file had not been distributed sufficiently to allow P2P to have much impact on Ioko's (and C4's bandwidth costs). I'm sure they weren't helped by the fact that I turned off my 4oD client as soon as the download had finished in order to save my bandwidth cap. This all meant that someone on BT's Central Plus that had been receiving data from me, had to find somewhere else to get it from - probably back to Ioko...

It is also interesting to note why I wanted to watch Panorama. Like many other visitors to the BBC's web site I had been intrigued by John Sweeney's tirade at Tommy Davis (official BBC version). As a blogger with an emphasis on online video, I was further intrigued by the use of video by the BBC to promote their programme and the use of YouTube by the Church of Scientology to counter the position taken in the programme - Scientology getting its retaliation in first.

So whatever your views, whether or not you believe we are descended from aliens or not, you can now make your views known to the world and with a bit of time and effort (and £2,000 of electronic equipment). I have no doubt that there will be a lot of long term fallout from this very high profile example of an electronic propaganda war.

On demand allows me to fill my precious hour with something I want. But it's not just about me, it's also a vehicle for advertisers who want to reach me. Consider for a minute how much you have learned about me by reading this article and hearing what I like to watch.

Put yourself in an advertiser's shoes and ask yourself how good a profile you could build of me if you could monitor what I watch when I really do have a choice. The uplink on an IPTV service is pretty much ideal for transmitting such detailed one-to-one demographics back to you, the distributor. You could be pretty sure to "know me" with a picture of my likes and dislikes over time. You can hit me with what can genuinely be called targeted ads. And, because you are in control of the content feed to my TV set, you can place personalised ads, just for me, that you know will be most likely to get a reaction from me. Even when I am watching The Bill, just like everyone else.

Labels: 4oD, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, targeted ads, timeshift TV, video on demand

[Permalink]