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Mark Hughes
Mark Hughes, Accenture
What is the interactive TV proposition that we are putting out there to the customers?
We are basically promising them a series of new products and services, some of which Clive Morton just mentioned. This is not just more content on the broadcast side; we are also maybe talking about things like video-on-demand, TV mail, online shopping, and online games such as those shown by Clive Morton. There is a huge increase in the range of content that is available, both in broadcast content and interactive content.
We are seeing operators continuously look to deliver new products and services. You won't see the broadcasters promoting the same content all the time. Applications are going to change, what people want to look at is going to change, stuff is going to get stale very quickly, and new applications and content stuff is going to have to come on.
Why are we worried about what the customer wants? Because in order to pay for all this infrastructure, set-top boxes and everything else, we are going to be looking to extract more money out of them, in one form or another.
There is going to continue to be a grab to get the best content. If you look back to the Sky example in the UK, Sky did not get to where they are, where they have 70 per cent market share, by having the best technology. They got there by spending large sums on both advertising and contents rights, for example for the English Premier League rights.
In terms the competition between digital products and services, we are seeing that people are not just spending their time looking at their TV; they are also using their TV to plug their Playstation 2 into that television. So the time they may have spent traditionally looking at the TV may now be spent on playing games. This is another threat to the current TV incumbents or DVDs. Then we have Optus coming in with all the wonderful new capability that they have, which allows them to put down more and more TV-like content. And eventually I would expect Foxtel to have a similar capability.
I think the other trend that we will see in the technology and convergence area, is going to be a convergence between set-top boxes, PCs, and games consoles. It is just too expensive to have to keep rolling out digital set-top boxes at hundreds of US dollars a time. That is just not a sustainable model.
Click here to view Mark Hughes' powerpoint presentation.
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