Video Quality No Priority in Streaming Universe, Streaming Media East Told

TV Everywhere, the theme of the 2011 CES, still has “a long way to go before the vision is realized,” said Jonathan Weitz, partner at IBB Consulting Group, during a panel on the business of TV Everywhere at Streaming Media East in New York Wednesday. Looming issues include working business models to meet the needs of different content providers, a globalization path, and which devices and operating systems to support as disparate cloud-, mobile and traditional viewing devices hit the market.

How to support the proliferation of devices and operating systems is a “big question,” said Michael Fisher, senior director of business development at Sling Media, which made apps available for Sling Media players early on, pre-iOS and Android, for Symbian, the first Windows phone, Palm and BlackBerry. Today, not only are there more mobile operating systems but the OS’s themselves “fork,” creating multiple versions of a single OS, he said, as in the case of Android. “Keeping up with every flavor of device and OS is not easy,” he said. “An app that works on one version of an OS may not work on another,” he said. Sling Media currently supports 71 devices, he said, but a “sensible solution” for content distributors is to support a couple of OSs. Choosing means having to preclude an ecosystem that maybe shouldn’t be ignored, he said. “Does that mean Android or iOS only?” or should companies expand support to game platforms or a connected TV, too, he asked. SlingMedia makes that cost-benefit analysis “as early as we can,” he said, “before we put resources behind creating an app."

"There’s a lot of chaos,” said Keith Wymbs, vice president of marketing for Elemental Technologies, whose customers are programmers, broadcasters and service providers. Although H.264 has become the de facto codec for video compression for over-the-top providers, other technological issues are less defined, including formats, Wymbs said. Customization for different streaming formats including Apple’s streaming solution, Adobe Dynamic Flash, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, MPEG Dash and UltraViolet has created a “land grab,” he said. Even if there’s a convergence of formats, there won’t be a convergence to the “end player” side to two dominant players, he said. The iPad stands alone as a given leader, he said, but beyond that there’s a selection process. “You're not going to go to 300” supported devices, he said. “You have to pick your battles where you'll have strength and where you're not going to put as much effort."

Panelists differed on the importance of the AV experience in the streaming video world compared with the home theater environment. When asked about when quality of service will come into play in the TV Everywhere experience, Bruce Eisen, vice president of online content development and strategy for Dish Network, said, “I think we're there for the most part.” He said video quality on Dish’s iPad app or on a laptop is “very high” but added, “some do it better than others."

Fisher of SlingMedia, a subsidiary of Dish, said users’ quality concerns over streaming media playback vary with the situation. “It depends on how you consider the experience,” he said. The big-screen home theater experience with surround-sound “will be hard to replicate,” but the trade off is the convenience of being able to choose “when and where I watch,” Fisher said. From the video quality side, “We're getting close,” he said, “but I don’t know that we'll ever have popcorn and the whole living-room experience” in the streaming world. Concerns over quality will come down to a lifestyle preference, he said. “Many people don’t have time to sit on the couch in front of the TV and view 3 minutes of SportsCenter or 5 minutes of CNBC,” he said, but in an airport with a tablet or smartphone, choice “is very important to them” and “maybe not the home theater experience."

HBO Go has been a successful model of TV Everywhere, panelists noted, but Seth Metsch, vice president, legal and business affairs, for A&E Networks, said that content providers that don’t have a subscription model and have to rely on advertising are at a disadvantage in the streaming world. The biggest challenge for A&E is finding a business model that supports implementation of programming, he said. “HBO makes the same money from subscribers whether they view on an iPad or TV, he said, meaning their investment in programming is the same regardless of format.

For ad-driven networks, Nielsen is the tool used to determine viewership, and agencies buy commercials based on Nielsen sampling ratings, Metsch noted. That kind of codified measurement isn’t available to date in the streaming world. Although Nielsen families can install a Nielsen app on their computer to measure viewing, that’s not likely to be a valid sample because “everybody does something on the Web they don’t necessarily want to have tied to them and announced for survey results,” Metsch said.

In the mobile world, a third-party software program like Nielsen isn’t available to run in the background for the iPad because “Apple doesn’t allow that in its ecosystem,” Metsch said. For iPad measurements to take place, every iPad app would have to have Nielsen embedded and the Safari browser would have to have Nielsen software embedded as well, he said, and “We're just not there yet.” Unlike Nielsen’s accepted position in the TV space, “there’s no universally accepted measurement of the advertising industry,” he said. Although Hulu uses comScore to rate viewership, the stakes are much smaller, Metsch said. “TV advertising dollars and Hulu advertising dollars are two different ballparks,” and ad-supported networks don’t want to pull viewers from the higher-revenue model, he said.

The Olympics will be an interesting gauge for the streaming medium and the value of content, said Wymbs of Elemental Technologies. One of the bylaws of the International Olympic Committee’s charter historically has been to expand the visibility of the Olympics to as many people in the world as possible, he said. Local broadcasters have rights to broadcast and digital delivery, he said. In some parts of the world programming is made available for phones, where there are more phones than TV sets, without authentication, he said. “Almost anyone in the world with a smartphone” will have access to the Olympics this summer, he said.