How Freeview, TiVo, Browning and Telecom fit together

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24026191@N02/3353222455/

I've been following the TiVo and Freeview developments with interest.

I always thought that there was a good market for a decent PVR (akin to MySky) for Freeview in NZ.

There are interesting parallels in the UK where BT launched MicrosoftTV (known as MediaRoom) with the UK Freeview service under the banner BTVision.

It's been clear here that there is not enough capital for Freeview to do this on its own in NZ. Just take a look at the MyFreeviewHD link on the site.

It's basically a simple page that says you can buy a Freeview approved PVR that can record 2 channels with a basic 8 page programme guide. It's clear that there is no appetite to release this product.And they have just followed the same branding as MySky HDi without the 'i'. You have to look hard to find one on the site. When you do, you'll find is $1150. Ouch.

What is also clear is that Freeview is reaching a maturity point as a business. The infrastructure is in place and I would be surprised if more than 50% of installed decoders are stand-alone. My pick is that a fair chunk of them are embedded in TV's like Sony Bravia. So not much left to do for a start-up - all the work is being done by the Consumer Electronics companies.

Enter TiVo - I think this will shake up the local marker due to its pure simplicity. The reason TiVo is successful in the US is because it is smart about recording programmes in an Amazon kind of way. MySky is totally driven by the customer - so the ability to 'discover' new programming is down to what other people tell you. TiVo's strength is that it predicts what you might want to watch based on what you have recorded already.

It's a different proposition to MySky.

It's also a different proposition to Freeview - TiVo is about control.

So that is why it's attractive to Mr Browning who announced his resignation today. It's not a defection as opposed to a well managed move given Steve's previous background at TVNZ.

It will be a different business to Freeview - which is about digital quality - and will require more input. Input in terms of cash and product management.

Which brings in Telecom.

Hybrid TV have stated they are looking for a third investor. Telecom has always had an aspiration to get into Internet based TV. There have been multiple attempts - FirstMedia, trials with Sky, investigations with Freeview. But it's never really worked out what its role is - content delivery, content aggregator or owner. This meant it made some pretty poor decisions by trying to play in areas where it had limited skills i.e. trying to own swathes of content.

This is a gift wrapped opportunity to get into TV in NZ in a relatively cheap way without having to deal with content rights. Development risk is low, technology and brand are proven, there are no major content deals to be done (movies are easy for anyone to get). It's the right way to do it.

I would pick them to add this to their refreshed home broadband proposition - home VoIP, broadband and TiVo - which they could bring to market later this year. Only speculation on my part but its what I would do!

As long as Seven, TVNZ and Telecom - should it be them - stay in governance mode as opposed to management mode then Steve will have good support to hit his 120k customers in year 1.

Obama, the hype cycle and fish

Along with a few billion of my fellow earthlings I've been following the election in the US today.

A huge day.

You gotta like the acceptance speech of Obama - hardly referred to himself, but primarily to his call for change. Masterful. This quote is the one I liked most. 

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

He gets change - and the fact it's never done in one big moment but lots of little moments. Claiming victory at this point for his position just would lead to failure

I hope his advisors are telling him about the Gartner hype cycle.

My gut tells me that he gets it, but there are going to be *a lot* of people out there who will be going through the trough of disillusionment - probably within the next 6 months - as he tackles some big global issues. As long as he is upfront about what he is doing and why he'll make it. (Note to self - must be careful about the advice I give incoming US presidents as will most likely be fairly opinionated and, while based on good experience, may not scale up so well)

Arlene and I though were lamenting the lack of leadership in NZ. Both McCain and Obama have shown real personal courage and control in their speeches tonight.Best quote of the night from Arlene 'Where is our Obama ?'. Quickly followed by 'All we have to choose between is a wet fish and a fried fish.'

There are a lot of people bagging ACT for having Roger Douglas in the line-up for this election but at least he was an agent of real change - whether you liked it or not. I almost feel like voting no-confidence this time - it's just that isn't even an option.

Add your WiFi hotspot to the iphone / ipod Touch database

I have been looking around for a way to do this.

Apple don't run this database themselves - it's managed by a company called Skyhook. Given Apple's descent into evil that might provide some comfort to you non-Apple fanboys out there.

It's easy.

Go to this link.

Enter your address and fiddle with the marker to locate it correctly.

Enter the MAC address of your WiFi router - you'll probably need to google the model of your router to do this.

Wait 7 days - when you use the maps application on your iPhone / iPod Touch, hit the center button on the lower left and Boom - there you are.

Will probably help a bunch of other apps that use this data - would love to know what they might be!

Voice Interfaces have a long way to go to be useful

At a demo last week, I was reminded how far Voice Interfaces have to go to be genuinely useful.

Quite apart from wondering whether voice interfaces are a solution looking for a problem, it made me think about my own experience with these technologies since I've been involved in a number of Telecom projects using Voice Interfaces.

The first one was VoiceDial - a network hosted voice recognition service that you could use to dial numbers by either saying the number or by saving a name. About 12 years ago when phones couldn't do this type of stuff. Had a great ad with a guy picking up his mother in law from the airport and having to dial her by his tag for her- 'The Old Trout'. Can't find it anywhere on YouTube. Let me know if you can find it!

Next one was a Voice Portal called WordUp- basically a Voice recognition system that allowed you to access audio content (primarily news, sport and weather, as well as reading your email to you).

Both of these had major performance issues under noisy conditions (pretty normal for mobile) which meant that the best you ever did was about 70% success rates. Pretty poor.

Having said that the primary customers who were interested were the Blind and there should have been a way to keep this service on - but I digress.

More recently we've had a voice interface as part of 123. The main aim was to direct customers to the most appropriate help as quickly as possible. This has recently gone through a dramatic simplification as again it wasn't able to achieve this - it pretty much just annoyed customers. Instead of asking you heaps of questions now, it asks one or two. Performance around complex answers was just not good enough for customers.

The demo I saw was for an integration between Microsoft Exchange and a softswitch. It produces some great benefits for customers in terms of managing fixed and mobile calling. One of the not so great benefits is the ability to manage your email using a voice interface. About 80% success rate from a fixed line phone! Fortunately the marketing person responsible for the product made the wisest statement I have heard in a demo like this for some time - "If it doesn't work, don't launch it".

So it seems that in over a decade not that much tangible progress has been made - from 70% success rate on Mobile to 80% success rate on fixed. You'd never tolerate that type of performance from a GUI so why do people think that it is tolerable on a mobile?

Until its possible to deal with all the variation in the human voice in an intelligent way this is one technology that I would stay well clear of for mass market use.

Have you seen it genuinely work in a mass market environment?

iTunes server?

Rod has been continuously amazed about the lack of a home iTunes and iPhoto server set-up. To be honest I agree - with a macbook and an iMac at home I don't like the mucking around we have to go through to sync up music and photo collections. Gets even worse when you store your photos on the imac, yet take the macbook on holiday and put pics on it.

This code might be starting to point to whether Apple are finally onto it. WWDC will no doubt tell. Hopefully it is not just another bonjour implementation.

Hat-tip to Philip for the code link.

Freeview HD on a Mac

With Freeview launching their HD box a few weeks ago, and not having taken advantage of HD goodness I 've been wrestling with whether I can justify another box in the lounge alongside MySky, Xbox and a Media Centre.

I am planning to ditch the Media Centre for an Apple TV based on UI alone - it's just too complicated for anyone who doesn't know the set-up.

I've been talking to Philip about this who is *the* man to talk to about all things apple.

He has put me onto Eye TV which he has been testing for a while now.

Philip confirmed yesterday that Eye TV v3 can happily record Freeview HD locally with readily available EPG feeds.

I am planning to hooking that up to a simple antenna, recording shows on the mac and pitching them to Apple TV. More work for me but one less box in the house.

And if enough people ask, Philip can start his own blog so I don't claim his ideas without attributing his input :)

Small Business hosting in NZ

I saw Swizzle via Rod Drury today.

I had wondered with the decrease in cost of servers whether there was an opportunity to get into this - especially with small businesses who don't need all the bells and whistles, just secure and reliable hosting.

The process looks super easy, but to be honest it wasn't that cheap ($1200 per annum for a linux server?) but I may be out of touch with pricing - I hope they do well.

Blast from the past

I saw this article this morning about a proposal from Telecom to install 6 new cellphone antenna the Foxton water tower.

Brought back a lot of memories - my first role at Telecom was running around the country side picking locations for cell-sites. Invariably we got a lot of resistance from people with genuine concerns about the health issues that might be associated with these installations. While people were genuinely freaked out (the unknown does affect people pretty deeply), when you think that these installations put out about as much power as a 1 bar heater, mounted at 20m (or more) above ground, there really isn't much ground for concern.

We did meet some extremely cool people as well. I recall talking to a farmer in Eketahuna about using his hilltop - he was very cagey until we said we would pay a rental and put in place a road up to the site. We got invited in for the best farm lunch ever :)

I remember this site in particular - was a great place to use existing infrastructure (my personal opinion was that the visual effects of sites was much more of an issue than health effects) and had great height for coverage. The primary concern from residents was that the local chicken farm would be somehow affected causing mutations, which would eventually poison the entire community. Council decided to take the offer on and also ended up doing a deal with Vodafone as well. Telecom antennas are on the top.

The reporter is probably the same one - persisted in thinking they were intelligent by using antennae as the plural of antenna. Antennae are on insects. Antennas are used for cellsites.

Playing with Yahoo!

I've been spending a bit of time playing around with the Yahoo! products available through Yahoo!Xtra.

I generally use this at home on my mac and was kind of disappointed that Pro Mail was not officially compatible with either Safari or Firefox. It seems there have been some upgrades recently which means that this compatibility now exists - works much faster on both browsers making it a much more useful service.

I was talking to the team at Telecom about the roadmap for more improvements - can't say anything too specific about them, but from the screenshots I saw, the evolution of this product is simply stunning. Expect to see more this year with a more social networking orientation and a better calendar product as well. The speed they are moving at is phenomenal. They are embracing OpenId very enthusiastically so expect to see more of an ecosystem approach from the team at Y!. Interesting observation from our team - our use of webmail in NZ is really low compared to the US - wonder why that is?

There is a blog from their developers if you want to know more about what they are doing with the mail product.

The other piece of capability I have been playing with is Yahoo! pipes.

I found this while trying to get comments from Plaxo Pulse integrated into my blog (more on that later - it isn't quite working yet). Its a great piece of capability - allows me to build, manipulate and output feeds by dragging modules around, applying filters and connecting them up. Brilliant - even I can (kinda) make it work.

There are some real benefits to this relationship in terms of open-ness that we didn't see with our previous partner.

Broadband Speed Increase

Living in Lowry Bay, we've been accustomed to relatively low broadband speeds of not much more than 1Mbps. This despite having a cabinet less than a km away. A couple of years ago while trialling IPTV services this annoyed not just myself but also my family as I was trying to get them to watch Video on Demand services with frequent buffering.

Up until now, I was of the opinion that this was a 'laws of physics' issue - copper wasn't in good enough condition to carry the bits fast enough. This was also because the modem I had was a Cisco unit which I considered to be state of the art - I mean if Cisco couldn't make it work, who could?

Until last week that is - I have been doing some work sourcing new modems for Telecom and thought I would try one out at home. Primary reason was that I had a separate Cisco WiFi point and modem and this was causing some clutter in the home office, so I thought an integrated device would make some sense.

I connected one up (brand yet to be disclosed - we haven't finalised commercials yet) and I was stunned to find I was operating at better than 4 Mbps. And I know we haven't been upgraded to DSL2+ yet.

Research indicates that the primary reason for the speed increase is that the modem is using a Broadcom chipset which matches what we use in the DSL cabinet down the road.

I have a few thoughts on this

1. I wanted to fix one problem and got a significant extra benefit for *free* - my clutter is seriously reduced and I have at least 3 times the broadband speed from previous. If that isn't keeping a customer happy then what is?

2. My experience in mobile is strangely much more robust - devices pretty much operate at maximum bandwidth. This is because they all have the same Qualcomm chipset (small exception where Nokia was operating their chipset for a while for CDMA 1x). While the Qualcomm model is more monopolistic it does ensure standardisation - which means things work better and more consistently. We all fear this from time to time, but the downside of choice is that you have to integrate more and more things go wrong. Having one supplier at either end of an important link makes things work better.

3. Taking the mobile argument on another step, I used to think that CDMA was a fragmented standard (it is - trust me), however broadband is much more so. It has not matured yet to the state where it is like GSM - hard to know whether what you have bought (or what your Telco has recommended) will work that well.

4. The speed makes a difference - streaming video from local sites is snappier, sites load faster, and I can even stream sport in watchable quality. Might even consider getting a faster upload plan now.

Overall lesson - check your modem has a Broadcom chipset. If not consider upgrading to one that does - you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Identity Conference in Wellington

Just saw this Identity Conference is coming to town.

This international conference on “Managing Identity in New Zealand: Identity
Conference 2008" is a forum for presenting and discussing state of the art
thinking, research and practice around managing identity in the 21st Century.
The conference will focus on the development and future directions of identity
management (IdM) in New Zealand, and its wider implications for users, with
particular reference to the introduction and use of new digitised forms of IdM.
A major issue for future IdM will be establishing user-centric IdM: individuals’
ability to control the (digital) representation of their identity and its
potential uses.

There are some stellar speakers here - Dick Hardt has one of the best identity primers of all time that I blogged about in 2006.

Miss it at your peril.

Mobile Commerce replacing bank branches in Australia?

I read this article from stuff this morning. The implication in the lead-in was stunning...

"Australians are fast deserting bank branches and soon won't even need a computer to transact, now that the country's major banks are rolling out mobile phone banking services."

It's stunning because it's wrong. You'd think that you'd soon be able to walk down the main streets of Sydney and not see any bank branches and that we'll all be using our mobiles to transact.

A visit to Australia recently demonstrated that banks are re-opening branches in suburban areas, and are extending opening hours for existing branches into the weekend and after 'normal' working hours. The same trend has been occurring in NZ.

Leads to to 2 questions - one on this topic and one broader.

1. Why are branches important for banks ?

Branches are important for banks as they provide a direct and personal link to their customer. When it comes to high complexity and high value transactions, customers will want to understand the impacts - they won't get this on their mobile, they'll get this by talking to a knowledgable bank employee. Sure banks will continually look for more efficient and more convenient ways to manage high volume, low complexity transactions. That becomes part of the portfolio of choices they offer to customers. It makes sense for banks to offer a multitude of ways - not just one way - to serve their customers. ANZ's Brian Hartzer makes this point in the article. That is the real headline.

2. Why does a belief exist that a new type of technology will totally supercede any existing means?

Maybe it generates headlines - I'd love to know from anyone who has been in the journalist or social marketing fields why it is necessary to be so black and white about this type of thing. Experience says that these changes are slow in coming and you never really know where they land - it is very rare to have one mode totally replaced by another. In this particular case there is no further detail in any of the article that Australians are fast deserting branches - yet the journalist or editor in question seems to think that it's important to know in this article. It isn't and it just seems naive.

Finally, it is good to see that something which has been around for around 5 years in New Zealand is seen to be a big thing about to happen in Australia . A great example of using NZ as a test market before moving to larger markets - best of luck to the M-Com team as they break into a larger population base. They've done a lot of hard work here building a business model and ecosystem - maybe payoff for the hard work is just around the corner....

Hard Handoff

14 years ago last week I started a new job at Telecom Mobile as a Cellular Engineer back in the days when that meant running around the country installing new cellsites. These days with that kind of title I'd be splicing genes...


One of the things I learned in the first week (other than sneezing next to one of my new colleagues got me banished to the other end of the floor) was the concept of handoff.

Handoff is part of the magic that makes mobile telephony work. It is the mechanism that allows a mobile to move from cell to cell while maintaining the call. Its what makes it 'mobile'. The only hitch was that 'maintaining the call' was a bit of a euphemism. The way it worked was that the system would detect that call quality was declining (or in the digital systems the mobile would detect that an adjacent cell had better quality characteristics), work out where the the best cell for the call might be, prepare a spare channel on the new cell and tell the mobile to tune to that channel.The mobile tunes to the new channel (leaving the call on the old one behind) and all things going well(there is NO such thing as perfect engineering) the call would be resumed on the new cell on the new channel.There was a noticeable break in the conversation while this process occurred - I used to think of it as a hopeful period where you'd hope that the system and the mobile had all got their act together.

I learned that belief was quite important in this process and spent a lot of time driving around testing the network, listening for breaks in calls and hoping that the calls would stay up. I guess that would be why I wasn't the best engineer - too much hope and belief!

That type of handoff is a hard handoff - breaks the connection before it makes the new one. The CDMA systems these days have a much more reliable and secure way of making handoffs work - the mobile stays in contact with a number of cells so never breaks the conversation until it gets to the edge of the system. That's a soft handoff - much better for customers but not so much fun for engineers. No so much hope and belief required.

I've initiated my own hard handoff this week and resigned from Telecom. The reason its a hard handoff is that I haven't got a new role to move to. I know what I want to do - which is to lead a company that makes a real difference for customers - and once I decided that, it would have been mercenary to look for that while I was here. Hence the resignation.

Mobile phones don't have their own emotions - but if they did they'd feel a mixture of uncertainty every time they went through a handoff. But over-riding all of that they'd be hopeful and optimistic. They'd believe that they could do it. And they'd just let go of what had been good for them and trust that they'd find something better.

Agile Development

We've been working with a major international Systems Integrator and have been exploring the use of Agile Programming methods for a major (ie 12 month+) project.

While Agile has been well covered in other forums, one of the areas that I note is significantly underplayed is the amount of cultural change required moving from Waterfall techniques to Agile. In particular, I note that people from a Waterfall background *still* want to complete full requirements before moving into the Agile phase - it takes a lot of effort to let go of that security blanket. And on top of that, integrating Agile based deliverables into Waterfall deliverables seems to be left for others to discuss- maybe it's best not to consider that right now but seems like a recipe for failure.

So I was really pleased to see the Agile Barcamp wiki set-up from the session here in Wellington two weeks ago. I was disappointed I couldn't make that session as I was in Auckland that day (story of my life!) - however I have had the benefit of seeing the presentations uploaded now and can contact the people who wrote them and ask them how to integrate Agile and Waterfall. Fabulous.

Ironically (or otherwise) I've noted that a couple of Dilbert cartoons have focussed on Agile recently.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071126.html

Being in the camp of the business owner, I personally like this one.

I found this here http://cns2.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/resources/dilbert-xp/