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23/04/2009
T(e)V-olution – “From today’s content production to tomorrow’s consumer experience”
The report.
On April 23rd 2009, about 75 ICT & Media professionals participated at the well-appreciated FITCE symposium, which took place at the Alfacam Studios premises in Lint, near Antwerp.
He symposium was moderated by Luc Blyaert, chief editor of DataNews, who introduced the 4 keynote speakers of this event.
Wim Vanseveren opened the conference in the name of Gabriel Fehervari – CEO of Alfacam who unfortunately could not join himself.
Wim gave an overview of the activities of Alfacam, which encompasses –amongst others- multi-camera captation services, content production and studio facilities.
A visit was organized to (part of) the fleet of their mobile studios (OB Trucks) which are used for on-site video capturing.
Next came Paul Hieltjes from Philips, who gave us an insight in the evolution of display technologies. LCD TV has overtaken completely CRT TV in only 5 years. The evolution in the next coming years will be mainly related to quality (better motion performance and improved resolution) and form factor (less space, picture on the wall). 3D TV still needs a few years before really taking off; as a consequence Philips will slow down its efforts in further promoting 3D TV. Connected and interactive TV will continue to grow; internet is seen as the de facto return channel.
A key component for digital TV is the Set Top Box. Dominique Delcoigne from CISCO highlighted the main trends in this domain. A first evolution is a move to open or de-facto standards (W3C, Flash..) and the implementation of browser technology in order to improve the customer user interface. Another evolution is the extension of the storage capacity and integration of transcoding capabilities in order to transfer the content to other devices with limited display capabilities (PSP, PC, mobile, remote devices). Two major challenges in improving the viewing experience are to deal with the error-prone environment (error correction) and reducing the zapping time. Another challenge is to keep power consumption within limitations as the number of technologies used in the set-top box is still increasing: increased RAM and storage, multiple decoders, WiFi for home networking…
The way how content is consumed is clearly changing. Stéphane Coruble from RTL gave an insight in the business challenges for a Broadcaster within the changing behaviour.
Brands are crucial for a Broadcaster. Brands must be used in a consistent way across the different platforms (TV & Radio broadcast, on-demand, web, mobile…). As all the evolutions in the digital content space are relatively new, business models for the multi-screen behaviour (consuming content on the web, TV, mobile… in a seamless and consistent way) are still in development. The main hurdles to take are the huge development costs and the needs for content adaptation to the different types of devices.
Willem Verbiest from Alcatel-Lucent elaborated further on this multi-screen opportunity and showed that the span of attention is completely different for different types of devices (from a few hours / day for TV sets to a few minutes / day for mobile devices). On the other hand the number of (potential) users differs also significantly (a few millions for IP TV sets, to hundreds of millions for mobile devices, and even much more for internet devices). The combination of those 2 drivers determines the monetization opportunity.
As a conclusion we can say that the Symposium gave a very good insight in the various aspects of the evolution for digital TV. Although digital TV is gaining momentum, there is still a lot to come and to expect in the coming years. Innovation will clearly continue to happen at a fast pace!
- Opening of the Symposium:
Media Content Platforms in a fast-moving Media environment
by Gabriel Fehervari, CEO Alfacam - Evolutions in Flat TV - Technology drivers from 1990 till 2015
by Paul Hieltjes, Senior Director Advance Development, BU Television
Philips Consumer Lifestyle - European IPTV market and Set Top Box evolution
by Dominique Delcoigne, Systems Engineering Manager IPTV &
Connected Home solutions, Cisco - Strategy of a Broadcaster in a Digital World
by Stéphane Coruble, Director RTL Digital, RTL - The Multi-screen opportunity
by Willem Verbiest, VP Multimedia Solutions Alcatel Lucent
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