MobiTV Seeking to Drive Video-Streaming for Wireless Carriers, MVPDs

MobiTV announced an HDMI dongle solution at the IBC2013 show that’s designed to give MVPDs a low-cost entry to TV Everywhere services. The dongle offers wireless, IPTV and DSL operators a way to enter the home, leverage existing customer relationships and broaden their branded offerings, the company said in a news release. With the dongle, MVPDs can take advantage of the second screen “as the tablet or smartphone becomes the remote control,” and create a better user experience in the living room, the company said.

The generic dongle has the potential to “make waves” in the industry, giving mobile operators a way to bring viewing into the home and to leverage the pre-existing footprint of mobile devices, MobiTV said. DSL broadband and IPTV providers can leverage the device as a low-cost means to multiroom deployments of TV Everywhere, the company said. According to CEO Charlie Nooney, the company’s expertise across platforms, “especially with Android, allows us to be creative with our delivery by integrating social recommendations and advertising insertion, among other cutting-edge advances.”

Joanne Waage, MobiTV vice president-strategic media partnerships and programming, told Consumer Electronics Daily that the company was working on the dongle before Google’s Chromecast announcement (CED July 25 p2) and that Google’s announcement “validates the marketplace” and will help familiarize consumers with the concept. The dongle is a replacement for a set-top box, and the light weight and low cost would easily enable consumers to place a dongle in each room, she said.

TV Everywhere, enabled by the dongle solution, brings operators and subscribers into the digital age, Waage said. “TV as it stands today is fairly analog,” she said. “It’s antiquated.” While Comcast has an advanced set-top box, leading-edge technology is “not pervasive” in the cable world, she said. Consumers are getting a linear experience via remote control for the most part. VOD is “clunky,” she said, compared with online video experiences that are much more intuitive, she said. “You can search, find and browse much easier than you can through the traditional cable experience,” she said. Roku and Apple TV pioneered the market for creating a positive streaming experience on TV, but users don’t want add-on boxes surrounding a flat-panel TV, she maintained. There’s a push to make streaming devices “smaller and smaller,” and a dongle is both small and portable, creating a simple multiroom TV Everywhere option for Android device users, she said.

MobiTV believes its wireless carrier customers should be able to bring their services into the home, Waage said, calling it a “natural fit” since the dongle is controlled by a mobile device. Unlike a set-top box, where the size can accommodate more horsepower and storage, a dongle is “about the DRM and the player” with the user experience handled by the device. The company mantra is that the smartphone is the set-top box of the future. “That’s where we're getting to with the dongle being a simple Wi-Fi router and player to the TV screen,” she said. Today dongles are lightweight in performance and loaded with basic technology that interacts with the mobile device, which controls the experience, she said. But “who knows,” she added. “By the end of the year these things could be as fully loaded as a lightweight set-top box.” Waage wouldn’t say when the dongles would be available.

The biggest obstacle to TV Everywhere becoming entrenched with consumers is “awareness,” Waage said. A “fraction” of cable subscribers know they have TV Everywhere capability and log in to use their TV Everywhere services, she said, with ESPN delivering the highest usage. The industry has been talking about the services for years but consumers have thus far largely compartmentalized usage of linear TV viewing to cable and streaming services to Netflix or another service, she said. “You're not trained to think a cable company would even do that or what it would look like,” she said. Once they find out about it, subscribers have to be “driven enough to find out how to use it” versus going online to view YouTube, something that’s second-nature to most broadband TV viewers, she said.

How to reach consumers is something the MVPDs “need to figure out,” Waage said. The next generation of potential cable subscribers “is expecting something entirely different,” she said. “They're expecting something more intuitive and so far that’s not being delivered by the cable operators.” Also confusing the picture today are differing content agreements from network to network. A subscriber may get Watch ESPN through most MVPDs but not streamed content from A&E, for example, she said. “It’s patchy at best,” she said. MVPDs are in different deal cycles with content providers, she said, estimating the various deals will wrap up over the next two years. Disney and Turner have made the most progress getting those deals done, she said.

MobiTV also said at IBC2013 it’s supplying its DRM agent for a Marvell-powered media player being integrated into EchoStar set-top boxes. The collaboration offers an end-to-end ecosystem to operators that is pre-integrated and pre-certified, which cuts down on time to market, it said. Incorporating MobiTV’s DRM in the Marvell chipset enables the delivery of “secure, premium content via the latest Android set-top boxes,” Nooney said.