Wednesday 24 March 2010

VALUE PARTNERS PRESENTATION AT BSG – THE SERVICE AND APPLICATION PROVIDERS VIEW

At yesterday’s well-attended BSG meeting, Value Partners (ex Spectrum Consulting) presented the results of their survey of service and application providers’ views on superfast broadband. People from BBC and Sky through mySpace and direct.gov were interviewed about how they saw things today, in a few months and over the longer term.

The basic conclusion was that it was the end user experience that mattered, and that access was not the only pinch point – the whole end-to-end service needed to work.
The current position was seen to be acceptable (for now) because expectations were low, and content providers could provide adaptive versions (eg text-only at busy times). But once TV sets have internet built in, and cloud computing takes off, expectations will rise and guaranteed quality of service becomes an issue. This could lead to a bandwidth crunch and even a “battle for bandwidth”.

Looking to the future, there were surprisingly few original ideas: HD everywhere, video meetings, enhanced collaboration – plus “something no-one has thought of”. Definitely a “build it and they will come” view – confident that any capacity will be fully used.

Surprisingly despite the importance of the end-to-end service, most service providers didn’t want to have to understand how the network worked, and didn’t talk to network providers very much. And they accepted that there would probably be a mix of capabilities for the foreseeable future.

The panel discussion was opened by Richard Cooper, responsible for IP distribution at the BBC. He explained how adaptive bit rate coped with the current network variability, and emphasised that customers would not put up with much buffering. HD iPLayer is available now, but demands a high powered PC as well as fast broadband, so is not used much. In the future he saw massively increased consumption of video, more devices especially IP on TV (they have Wii applications already), HD essential, and linear TV over IP – notably the Olympics. QoS vs neutrality issues are going to have to come to a head soon, with challenges for smaller players.

Ed Uzzell of Sony explained their vision of 90% devices connected by 2012, and saw an IPTV arms race between content providers and device manufacturers.

Mark Hewis of LoveFilm described the on-demand service they had launched with Sony. Customer expectations were the same as for broadcast TV – buffering not acceptable. He wanted ISPs to take the lead in explaining what the network could deliver – he’d rather know in advance that a particular location could not received the streamed version, because he could offer the customer the option of downloading it and playing it back in say 10 mins. Streaming games would driev huge demand with non-cacheable content.

The discussion afterwards dealt mainly with the relationships with content delivery networks and how that needed to improve. The BBC work had at it themselves, but despite their size, even they needed help and could not cover every ISP.

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