Corporate slogans are so common that they often go unnoticed by the public as so much marketing noise. In the case of Time Warner Cable however, their decision today to implement tired pricing for "so called" heavy users of Internet bandwidth could make their slogan, "The Power of You" that much more poetic.

Under the new plan user will pay between $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan's cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. "To put it mildly," says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, "the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior." The company discounts those claims and said that in the Beaumont Texas trials only 14% of users exceeded their cap and had to pay additional fees of about $19 per month.

Some have suggested that the cell phone industry model applies here, namely users who go over their allotted minutes are charged extra per month. The problem is Internet providers have never charged users based on that business model and perhaps that will change as Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said. "We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension."

While Infrastructure is not free, there is a real concern that companies will use this argument as simply a marketing tool to collect more revenues from consumers. As iTV is in a nascent period with more video content on-line is now the time to be stunting the growth of the medium? In these depressed economic times people will vote with their wallets and it may become the power of us to dump you as our provider.

Tivo and Blockbuster will announce today a joint distribution and marketing deal.

I recall as late as last August when some analysts were talking as if we would all be dancing on Tivo's grave. Their prognostication (you see how well they can predict the future) was that while Tivo while experiencing consecutive quarters of growth it would continue to see a weak forecast due to customer churn and competition from other sources.

While it's correct that MSO's are offering cheap DVR alternatives, Satellite and platforms like Roku for Netflix all draw profits away from Tivo, it is curious to see Blockbuster, the once monolithic symbol for DVD rentals will announce today they are partnering with Tivo to offer between 5,000 too 10,000 titles at any one time, mostly newer releases like "The Dark Knight" that will typically cost $3.99 to watch over a 24-hour period. In addition, Blockbuster will sell Tivo DVR's in their stores however, specific models and pricing were not discussed. The Blockbuster feature will be available for standalone users of the TiVo Series 2 and 3 units, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL DVRs.

Blockbuster On Demand will be accessible only to the approximately 800,000 TiVo owners who have broadband Internet connected directly to their TiVo boxes. The company already offers online rentals through the Movielink service it bought from a group of studios in 2007.
"We are excited to be teaming with TiVo, the company that created the DVR, to make Blockbuster's entertainment content readily available to their millions of subscribers," Jim Keyes, chief executive of Blockbuster, said in a statement. "Ultimately, our vision is to work with TiVo so that their subscribers can access movies not only through our On Demand service but also from our stores and through our by-mail service as well."

Considering Blockbuster is trading below one dollar, a level at which some companies had been delisted in the past, Tivo on the other hand is trading at about seven times that amount. The company still offers an unrivaled OS and UI which has provided the company with the agnostic means to attract players like Amazon and Blockbuster. That no one platform has yet cemented the lean back entertainment crowd, it should not be lost on analysts, who my friend now calls the idiots who just downgraded your stock that forecasting is more then looking at formulation trends and tables, it's about customer excitement and desire.

By: Francesco Calonico

The Italian TV market has the peculiarity that cable television never developed, due to regulatory approaches, while the analogue television market developed very strongly between two main players, RAI (the public broadcaster) and Mediaset Group, a private one.

This two groups take more than 95% of the TV advertising market in Italy, which is about 5€ billions; other nation-wide broadcasters are Telecom Italia Media and MTV (with less the 3% of the market share) and hundred of local broadcasting stations. In this scenario, another player, a satellite one, emerged in the last 6 years: SKY; SKY is from News Corporation group and has reached 5 millions paying users at the end of 2008 in Italy, with advertising revenues in the order of some hundreds millions of euros.

Since 2004, according to the European defined scenario, digital terrestrial television (DTT) has been introduced, with a plan to switch off analogue transmissions from 2012. Currently more that 5 millions DTT Set Top Boxes have been sold in Italy and all new sold TV set should be DTT enabled;

DTT covers 75% of the Italian populations and more than 20 channels are available. Most channels are Free To Air but the Mediaset Group has also a PayPerView service ("Mediaset Premium") for soccer matches, new movies and first vision TV series.
DTT Switch off will be introduced region by region in order to arrive at the 2012 goal: currently the Sardinia region is completely digital, and many more are coming in 2009, covering in DTT only about 14 millions people out of 58 millions

DTT switch off is managed by the government with the help of DGTVi, a consortium of the broadcasters for technical rules. Last January RAI and Mediaset announced a new satellite services, named "Tivu' Sat", similar to the Freeview model in UK (some info in Italian at Sat-Zone )

Meanwhile, all major telco operators in Italy launched IPTV services in the last years: Telecom Italia (the incumbent), Fatsweb (the first operator with an iptv service in his portfolio) and WIND. While Wind is in his very early stages, Telecom and Fastweb have both reached about 300K customers.

The services offered are both linear channel (via multicast), and video on demand services. Value added services offered are typical IPTV ones, such as content categorization or channel list customization, HD for both live transmissions and vod, content recommendation and some advanced search feature or like PVR functionality.

Nevertheless IPTV is going to become one of the key services telcos will bet on, in Italy. The switch off from analogue TV broadcasting to DTT one, will take place for the next 2 years and opens a lot of opportunities. People will find themselves in the condition to choose to buy a new TV set with an integrated tuner or a DTT stb. But there is a third way. IPTV service could become one of the alternatives the customer will choose among: all IPTV services in fact are ready with Hybrid STB (i.e. both DTT and IP).

Combining in one STB its offer with the other four major Italian TV broadcaster ones, both air and satellite, a Telco is able to offer a complete solution to customers coming from the analogue world.

The "all in one box" is the way followed, with DTT, IPTV, internet, DLNA for home media sharing. The business requirements are pushing hard the evolution of the software platforms that are used to deliver IPTV services In fact, to achieve this goal the SW "platform" managing the IPTV services should be open and flexible, able to offers Digital Asset Management - DAM - services and to integrate with external Operation and Business Support System (OSS/BSS).

To cover all the "broadcasting" offers already present in the market, agreements have been be made with SKY ( the most important satellite operator in Italy) and with the other three major broadcaster: RAI (the national one), Mediaset and LA7. Each agreement has its own peculiarity and telco platforms should be flexible enough to interface itself with OSS/BSS/CMS of the external company.

This is achieved by putting in place a complex architecture with several components.
Among them, a contribution network, which carries all the signals coming from broadcasters to the DAM, where all the asset management is performed. For example, a provider (both broadcasters and content providers) can manage directly its own piece of content by using services exposed (e.g. vary the asset metadata or ingest an epg variation) or control all the content life-cycle.

Also, a Service Delivery Network could be used to give the content provider the possibility to manage their own customer, even on the IP network that is viewed by the broadcaster only as another distribution channel. This is achieved always by services exposed that provider can directly access. So each TV broadcaster who views IP-network just as a another distribution channel can send grants relative to his own content offer to his own customer.

From the customer point of view, he has only one stb, can subscribe services from several providers (telco, broadcasters, content providers) and can choose to have separate relationship (e.g. bill) with each one or delegate the telco to manage all the offers with only one bill (the same of the telephony service)

So, many business models can be chosen: the same customer is an "IP" one for the telco, but also a TV one for the broadcaster. Another model could be a wholesale one with telcos selling a kind of a "white label" iptv to the broadcaster that will customize the experience he wants his customer to have. Naturally a traditional revenue sharing model could also be adopted.

The "platform" should also offer a DRM/CAS services and the efforts during agreements are to not have more than one cas on the stb. So broadcaster should send their clear signal to each distribution platform (the IPTV being one of them) leaving the encryption step to the distributor (Telco in this model).

The aim is to find in every scenario a model convenient not only for telco but also for broadcasters and providers that can use IP network as an additional distribution channel. For Telcos this is the best way to compose a complete offer giving the customer only one box: dtt, iptv, and with an hard disk, also a home NAS.

Clearly, the more the system has appealing to attract customers coming from different realities, the more telcos can attract ADV investments. But the market is continuously changing, and new trends must be followed since now. Not only traditional TV customers, used to interact with TV set only by changing channels, but also users who wants to combine the usual TV experience with a "2.0" one e.g. remaining in contact with communities, chatting, sharing contents, video-calling etc.

And IPTV is the most natural way to merge these services and give customers an integrated experience. This is the way Telcos will follow, enabling their platform also to be open to "add" service as market will require them. The aim is to attract again to TV a lot of younger people already used to interact with web oriented services while bringing near the Internet services the more traditional TV customers.

Francesco Calonico is a Broadband Services & Multimedia Engineering specialist in Italy for a Telecom provider

image c. iStockphoto

In bidding on an Indie feature as a DP, I experienced the harsh reality of the New York feature market, to wit DP's are not working much and I guess for that matter others in the craft may not be much either. Rental houses are slow, Producers have their pick of the litter when it comes to owner operators who can charge next to nothing for a Vari-cam package with all the bells and whistle's, this just so they are working. For those of us who do not own gear, well were screwed.

This would have been my first feature and I've not needed to rent any gear in the past year or so. My friends at a small rental house said the market is flat and people are not renting except for little stuff, he used another word for stuff. This was echoed by another friend who sees a reduction of camera work, good that she has editing work to keep her busy.

Yet, I speak to iTV CEO's all the time and they see sufficient amounts of work to keep their tools, development or platform company busy. Is this stability in that part of the market so media outlets can create content to go on-line? Well I doubt it. Quarterlife was several million an episode (and I'd suggest about 80% of that was wasted money for distributing on-line) and while it had a following, it failed to gain enough eyeballs to drive cpm and make it worthwhile for established media execs who've gorged on the fat of OTA and Cable revenues for years. If this is the case how are Indie producers going to make it under the current economic model forget about that we are in the deepest recession since the 1040's?

Back to the feature, I was already planning out the a look in my mind (minimalist without too much camera movement, I love it when actors walk into focus, or when the shot makes it just due to great composition) for this 21-day project - it would have been great for my reel and the DP part of my ego. I guess I'll stick to 1's a 0's for the moment, at least there it seems I can find the dog food.