Viodi View - March 8th, 2006 Issue

In this on-line publication, we share our analysis, opinions and direction on the interactive television news and views that we believe will be of interest and use to our friends associated directly or indirectly with independent telephone companies. For more information as to the various ways Viodi works with independent telephone companies, please go to http://www.viodi.com/alliance/

Disclaimer:

The Viodi View [Viodi, LLC] and its associates used their best efforts in collecting and preparing the information published herein. However, the Viodi View [Viodi, LLC] does not assume, and hereby disclaims, any and all liability for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions resulted from negligence, accident, or other causes.

All displayed trademarks, logos and service marks are the property of their respective owners. © 2006 Viodi, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Viodi View Newsletter - March 8th, 2006

Click here to learn more about the Content Pavilion

By Ken Pyle, ken.pyle@viodi.com, Managing Editor, Viodi View

14 Reasons to Visit Viodi's Content Pavilion
Answer This - Content Participant Quiz
Alan Weissberger on the AT&T-BellSouth Deal
MTA - Local Gets Around by Roger Bindl
One Operator's Solution - Create Its Own HD Content
Weissberger's Wireless World - A WiMAX Update
MovieBeam - It Must Be Real, As I Heard an Ad for It on AM Radio
Viodi Job Board ----Get Those Jobs Ready
Krazy Ken's Korner - Photobucket - The Heart of an Independent Telco

Trust – is a good brand nothing more than trust? Trust that the products behind the brand will work reliably. Trust that you can try the brand’s new product or service and it will work. Trust that when the product doesn’t work as planned, customer service goes out of its way to make sure the customer is happy and that the brand is not tarnished.

What prompts these thoughts is my recent and ongoing unpleasant experience with a behemoth brand – really a couple of brands. With no notice to their customers, these unnamed brands apparently severed a relationship with one of their suppliers that had helped them extend their brand beyond their core product. The bottom line is that Viodi has been cut off from its latest subscriber list. So, I apologize if you are getting this email and have previously unsubscribed.

It also means I have had to spend way too much time trying to find a work-around to this challenge. Of course, communicating with these brands has been a time sink. In the back of my mind, I wonder if these well respected companies are really going to safeguard the Viodi information as they promised. All of these things erode the goodwill and trust I once felt for these well known brands and make it much more likely that I will defect to a competitor, given the right offer.

The cautionary lesson I learned from this experience is that brand extension can bring new revenue, but it also can cheapen the brand if something falls apart.

14 Reasons to Visit Viodi's Content Pavilion:

Fourteen is the number of sponsors supporting Viodi’s Content Pavilion at TelecomNEXT. It is exciting to have such high caliber sponsors supporting Viodi in this inaugural event. These companies have unique offerings that are relevant to independent telcos. To learn more about their offerings, please click here.

In addition to a booth, we are organizing the Content Sessions and Awards Panel. This is a great deal, as the sessions will include screenings of local content submitted from around the country, as well as lots of video editing software giveaways and three great panels titled:

For those operators interested in submitting content, please submit this form. Complementary registration to the TelecomNEXT exhibit floor can be found by clicking here.

Answer This - Content Participant Quiz:

Easy-to-use tools are enabling just about anyone to create and publish content that, in years past, would have required legions of highly paid software engineers and specialized artists. An example of content created via a relatively easy-to-use tool is provided in the following interactive quiz put together by Roger Bindl.

The quiz is a fun way to learn a little bit more about some of the participants in the Content Pavilion. The underlying technology that powers this quiz is Adobe’s Flash product. Using a Flash-provided template, Roger was able to quickly generate content that is relevant to the topic at hand and, hopefully, engaging to the reader.

This quiz is an example of community relevant content that an independent telco could add to their web site to make their broadband service more compelling to their customers.

Special Feature - Alan Weissberger on the AT&T-BellSouth Deal

It will be interesting to see if the old SBC (the new AT&T) entertainment video initiatives will be extended to BellSouth. Project Lightspeed aims to deliver IPTV as part of a triple play service bundle over a hybrid fiber-copper access network. HomeZone (a venture with EchoStar Communications Corp) plans to introduce a new set-top box that will enable consumers to get both satellite-TV and movies, programs and other content via the Internet.

BellSouth, has been slow to embrace IPTV or other forms of residential video, unsure about the potential payoff, readiness of the technologies, and the high upfront investment required.

AT&T already had the most aggressive plans for pushing entertainment TV into living rooms. Adding BellSouth's customers would lift AT&T's annual sales to $120 billion (source: WSJ), giving the company cash and scale to pursue its TV strategy nationwide. Forget about their terrible track record in this area (huge failures in 1993-1995). My guess is that the old BellSouth management will reluctantly accept one or both of AT&T's video projects.

Whether it succeeds or not, the enterprise network customer will likely be neglected as investment is redirected at residential video and quadruple play service bundles. The technology likely to benefit from increased spending on IPTV/ residential video is BPON and GPON.

Contact Alan Weissberger at aweissberger@sbcglobal.net

MTA - Local Gets Around by Roger Bindl

Watch this "VBlog" coverage of the MTA convention for highlights from speakers regarding the hurdles and successes of offering on demand and selling broadband. As you watch this, you will see that Roger rode local buses to the MTA state convention, a forum which attracts Telco's from throughout the region, to report for Viodi View's national newsletter.

One Operator's Solution - Create Its Own HD Content

The Optical Entertainment Network made some interesting news this past week with their announcement regarding their plans to implement a Tut headend. The more revolutionary announcement from OEN is that they are launching a studio to produce high definition content. According to Glen Fulce, executive vice president of OEN Studios, there is going to be a, “huge demand for high definition content.” OEN Studios, a wholly-owned subsidiary of OEN, will be operated as a separate business unit to help fill this demand.

OEN Studios is looking at providing a variety of programming from reality-based to sitcom to comedy sketch shows. They will be developing programs internally, as well as working with independent producers. They will be licensing the content to entities for distribution beyond OEN and suggested that foreign markets will be receptive to what they plan on producing. In fact, Fulce suggested that some of their programming might show up in Europe before it appears in America. Like any studio, they are planning on licensing content for playback on various devices, as well as traditional media, such as DVDs.

By creating their own programming, OEN is attempting to take control of their content destiny. With the continuing drop in the costs of production and potential licensing fees to offset those costs, the OEN Studios concept should be a good complement to the IPTV network OEN is developing. Fulce said that the first shows from OEN Studios will air in the first quarter of 2007, which will be coincide with the launch of OEN’s residential network. The idea that content, whether it be local or international in scope, should be developed concurrent with the launch of an IPTV system is a good one and one that independent telcos should consider.

Weissberger's Wireless World - A WiMAX Update

Trendsmedia and Heavy Reading (Light Reading Inc.'s market research division) have just provided new insights into the future of WiMax. In separate reports, they examine WiMax market dynamics, vendor positioning, service provider plans, and WiMax Forum activities. On March 1st, Trendsmedia held a webinar for analysts, while Heavy Reading provided selected results of their WiMax service provider study via email. Both organizations announced the availability of their new WiMAX market research reports. Click here to read the complete article.

MovieBeam - It Must Be Real - I Heard an Ad for It on AM Radio:

MovieBeam must be real, as I heard an ad for it on a local radio station. Will anyone buy? In their advertisement, they certainly did not play off their strong Disney brands. Instead, they focused on the promise of immediate availability of the most current content. Five years ago, this type of marketing against the video store's weakness made sense, but is this still a problem in today's world of ubiquitous video offerings, such as VOD, mail-delivered DVDs, sell-through DVDs and the Internet?

Viodi Job Board ----Get Those Jobs Ready

For a couple of years the Viodi View has had a job board that appears from time to time. The purpose of this has been to help Viodi View community members connect with job opportunities. To date and for various reasons, this has been pretty informal. It looks like we will be taking this to the next level soon, so get your jobs ready. More details in the next issue, but, in the meantime, if you are interested in posting opportunities, please send it to jobs@viodi.com.

Krazy Ken’s Korner - Photobucket - The Heart of an Independent Telco?

During the bubble craziness of the late 1990s, much of Silicon Valley seemed to forget its engineering roots and got caught up in the frenzy of stock options and ever increasing market valuations. Today, the so-called Web 2.0 era is more about building products and businesses, as opposed to shallow hype. Last week, I had a chance to meet a prototypical Web 2.0 pioneer, Alex Welch, the CEO and founder of a company called Photobucket. Like the Silicon Valley start-ups from the early days, Welch and co-founder, Darren Crystal, started this venture in their spare time and financed it through cash-flow.

Photobucket essentially serves as a utility that makes it easy for novices to post pictures to the web and then link them to social networking sites like My Space or auction sites like EBay. In three years, they have grown to 12 million users with links to over 400,000 sites. Most of these users are in the 16 to 25 age range; what Sergio Monsalve, Photobucket’s VP of Marketing terms, “the C3 Generation.”

Photobucket attributes its success to creating avenues that allow them to listen to their customers. They use that feedback to constantly tweak the service and add features that their customers want. They also said they are careful not to compete with their partner companies. Their focus is to be a utility and help enable their partners. Photobucket divides the market into five segments – social networking, e-commerce, gaming, enthusiasts’ sites and blogging.

So, it is no surprise that they just launched video, as it is becoming a must-have for any web site. Using the Adobe Flash product, premium members can self-publish videos that are up to three minutes in length. At $25 per year and 1 Gigabyte of space, premium membership is pretty inexpensive. From my quick non-lawyer read of their terms and conditions, they don’t appear to be trying to grab rights to a user’s content, like so many of the other video web site that are available these days.

Example of a BucketStrip

To show the service in action, yours truly posted a number of still images from various Viodi produced conferences were posted to the Photobucket web site. Code was automatically generated to produce the various effects. Note, the HTML newsletter has a slightly different look and feel as compared to www.viodi.com. This is because the service Viodi uses to send the newsletter does not support Flash and dynamic HTML was used, instead of Flash (as can be seen at www.viodi.com).

Using Photobucket to create these clips was much faster than if I had used desktop web design tools. I gave up options in terms of being able to control things like timing, sizing, etc., but for a non-artist like me it is good not to have to think about those decisions.

More importantly, based on what I heard from their CEO and from what I have seen of their web site, this seems to be a company that can be trusted over the long-term to do right by their customers. In short, even though its headquarters is in Silicon Valley, it seems to have the heart of an independent telco.

Example of a BucketStamp

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