Network Insight Institute

Jason Romney

Jason Romney, itv world

We are a small Australian content and technology company. We got a grant from the AusIndustry R&D Start Program for $1.35 million in May 2001, and we set about hiring a team of programmers – information architects, artificial intelligence experts, interface designers. All the people that you need to build a product that we thought was going to be in big demand by both the Australian broadcasting industry and overseas.

What we did was look at the experience of companies like The Fantastic Corporation with their channel editorial centres, and channel management centres. We looked at the needs of customers who were coming to us, such as Microsoft who needed their Windows Media portal managed both in Australia and in Asia. We looked at Telstra’s needs, as a broadband content aggregator, and the broadband programme guide they launched recently which we built and maintain for them. And we also looked at the experiences of some of the people who joined us from overseas in countries like Sweden, who were further down the track on aggregating service providers on terrestrial and cable broadcast networks.

We analysed that experience and looked at what the real obstacles were to making money from interactive digital television. We felt it would be an opportunity to develop a product that allowed content and service providers to introduce interactive services onto their broadcast network, and maintain them over time in a highly automated manner. We have set about building this product.

I thought it would be useful to follow that through to some of the issues of today. This is, after all, about local issues and trends. What we did in developing content, along with this technology product, was to look at the early ways of bringing interactivity to content.

For Telstra, we developed an interactive technology that enabled video to be synchronised with interactive events that would unfold around them. Some of you may have seen examples of that with Yahoo Finance Vision for example. This is a way of doing crudely, on the web, some of the things that we are hoping will happen on interactive digital television.

We were looking at how that kind of interactive experience is going to be relevant to the interactive digital television world, where a content experience like Big Brother requires an evolution from what it is today. You start with the television version, the streaming video on the web, and the interactivity, the community building interactivity. You then turn it into something more sophisticated, where the interactivity can be included in the broadcast stream, and where the interactivity on the web uses a much broader spectrum of devices, platforms and interactive strategies than merely using the 1900 number, or some of the things that we have already seen on the website.

What we did then was to work on how the product that we are building could facilitate the creation of that kind of content/user experience and its maintenance over time. Chris Williamson mentioned earlier this morning that a crucial goal for the free-to-air commercial networks was developing a relationship with the end user. Andrew Cohen also mentioned the need to turn viewers into users as a crucial goal. So the user experience is becoming increasingly important. But fostering these relationships is very difficult, and very expensive. So we were trying to do something to facilitate it.

The impact of PVRs is of vital significance. Another thing that our product does is handle meta-tags. I worked on a couple of datacasting projects some years ago, one was an info-box, which was a company started by Justin Mill. We set up a set-top box and content play there, which later evolved into an OzEmail project. We also worked at the ABC at that time, and many of the issues that we were talking about, concerning file management and so on in the analogue space, are now ones that we are engaging within the digital space.

In terms of local issues and trends, the local development industry is affected by things like the MHP standard, and ambiguity as to when it will be established here. At the recent Digital Television 2001 conference, the earliest estimate was mid-late next year, while others were saying 2003. Where does that ambiguity leave the local development industry?

In the local industry now, Austar is OpenTV, Optus is Liberate, Telstra and Foxtel haven’t decided yet but have looked at the OpenTV platform, and the free-to-airs are using MHP. This impacts content creators such as ourselves seeking to create innovative content. I notice that Tribe shut down their web publishing business in the press today, and when you look at all the companies, such as Rush, or Scape – there is a litany of them – no longer in the game you realise this is a last-man-standing game.

We are trying to make a call on which platform to author content for, when creating original innovative creative content. We hope that revenue streams will come to us, from our expertise in all those platforms, in re-purposing advertisements, for example, for advertising agencies. Their need will be to have those ads work effectively on all the different platforms. But for us as an original content provider, that produces 10 or so programs in entertainment, news, all sorts of areas. Trying to make a call is a prohibitive difficulty.

Until we work out ways of addressing this issue in Australia, perhaps through government support, or the efforts of a ‘Platform Co’, the issue that has been identified over and over today – about content being the key driver that will make or break whether we have a digital television industry in Australia – is simply not going to come to any fruitful outcome.

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