Anthony Smith-Chaigneau believes that deep down open standards in set-top architecture will prevail.
European Digital Television has been seeking new ways to engage with the customer.
“Interactive TV” was a way to do that, with its ability to create new revenue streams with targeted advertising and other revenue generating methods such as voting, portals, chats and a variety of new services. Pay-TV Operators, in particular, have spent billions of dollars every year in “software purchases” – in the form of licensing fees and royalties – giving them the right to exploit certain chosen middleware formats. These are all formats that would not allow implementation of alternative APIs/Systems and thus deemed “proprietary” and a means to keep the competition our of the equation. Most of them are now realising that an expensive lock-in proprietary system is not the future!
So that takes us to the DVB-MHP specification, which was invented to “Open Standard”, the middleware market. Proprietary vendors saw their “billion dollar market” at peril and fought very hard to “bad mouth” the DVB-MHP and inhibit its entry into the market. It has been a long and turgid business.
To make it even more difficult many of those vendors (early interactive TV specialists) joined the MHP Patent Pool with their essential IPR (some doubt the validity of many submitted claims and this is another debate) and they were, unfortunately able to manipulate the MHP Licensing Fees regime. The conspiracy theory is of course in order to make it even more doubtful that a new broadcaster would take up the technology – especially in the DTT marketplace.
Public service and commercial DTT Broadcasters (unless they have pay-TV plans) do not see the benefit of licensing a “non-revenue generating, investment onerous” product and this is where the problems lie in the broadcast fee-licensing scheme.
In an ironic twist the take-up of DVB-MHP in the digital television operator/broadcaster (pay-TV) domain is increasing. The argument is that fees have to be paid for interactive software so why not select an open standard middleware that does not lock you in and has far cheaper tools/applications and lower royalties than any proprietary system. The technical merits of MHP have never been in question…it is a thoroughly modern technical system designed for Next Generation Networks.
The coming together of the standardisation efforts led to an excellent body of work in looking at a global framework for interoperable applications:
GEM (Globally Executable MHP) which saw the coming together of the Specification Bodies for a more common Framework across all varieties of Open Standard Middleware globally (Cablelabs/ATSC/ARIB and the DVB).
BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) has selected the GEM Framework for its Interactive BD-J
OpenIPTV Forum is now working closely with the MUG: Manager of the GEM Specification to implement profiles for its IPTV Standards.
However in Patent Pool and Licensing Terms there remains an open issue on the DTT FTA Usage Fees regime and whilst that remains unknown, or at least contested, we will see a slower than anticipated take-up of pure MHP in the DTT market place.
Where the most important element lies, yet unexploited, is in the domain of hybrid set-top boxes. You cannot put different and conflicting Software in a device that straddles IPTV and Broadcast. It has been tried and has failed. So a single GEM Middleware would be an ideal technical solution for economies of scale and technical support.
I believe that we have not learnt from the analogue television fragmentation errors of the past, human beings rarely do! What is required is time, time for the problems to be re-lived and realisation that proprietary and fragmentation in this industry does not make for successful business.
Just look at the IPTV industry as it struggles in a quagmire of proprietary solutions (many, many more than Digital TV ever had). They struggle to find a standard and we all work extremely hard to offer one up. The DVB is in the game, ATIS/IIF/Open IPTV FORUM/ITU and so on. Quite frankly economies of scale in a fragmented market are unachievable. One day, and we know not when, CEOs and CTOs of these systems will realise this and find that it will be time to invest in Open standards that are intended to help not hinder their progress to television of the 25th century.
Anthony Smith-Chaigneau – Alticast GmbH
