if connected

The TV industry is being transformed by multiple trends: consumers embracing high definition; Internet TV viewing; IPTV roll outs; TV catch-up and other on demand services becoming increasingly mainstream.
Jupiter is conducting its annual TV Executive Survey for the European Digital Home Service.
If you work for a broadcaster, a cable/satellite/IPTV TV operator, a rights owner, or a TV production company, and have a few minutes to spare, your answers will help us collect interesting data on the state the of the TV industry. You can take the survey by clicking here.
We will use this data in combination with our existing proprietary consumer survey data on consumer attitudes and behaviours for new reports this summer.
To thank you for your participation, we’ll send you a free copy of the aggregated survey results.
Please also note that:
- Individual responses are strictly confidential.
- Responses are only used in an aggregate and anonymous form.
If you have any questions about this survey at all, or would like to be interviewed by Jupiter for this research, please contact me: ifogg /at/ jupiterresearch /dot/ com and I’ll either help or forward your email on to my colleague Laurence Meyer who is leading on this piece of research.
Thanks! We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

The debate raging between ISPs and the BBC over the iPlayer catch-up TV service highlights the strain that ISP business models are under.
In essence, a combination of fierce inter-ISP competition and the confusing marketing of broadband packages, has led to a tailspin of residential broadband pricing as consumers choose the cheapest offer. ISPs are simply receiving less and less (broadband Internet) revenue from each consumer, so they are seeking revenues from other sources such as content providers ie the net neutrality debate (read this net neutrality report), or through behavioural advertising models (e.g. Phorm and soon others), or through multiplay bundles (read this report on multiplay).
Alongside this declining per user revenue, Internet traffic is increasing due especially to the rise of video services such as iPlayer (UK), Hulu (US), 4oD (UK), Sky Anytime (UK), Joost, Babelgum, Youtube, Flickr, etc. etc. as well as the pirating of tv programmes and movies using peer to peer networks. So, ISPs’ bandwidth costs are rising.
ISPs are attempting to control these traffic costs. Some ISPs have opted to impose explicit data volume usage limits on broadband users. Others have increased the degree of traffic management they deploy so reducing broadband speeds for consumers that exceed (sometimes secret) preset thresholds, or lowering speeds for certain applications (e.g. p2p) . Some of the ISPs that used the above tactics, have continued to market their broadband as ‘unlimited’, or in a couple of cases as fibre optic. Both of these tactics are misleading and encourage consumers to pick the cheapest broadband product available.
So, it’s not a surprise that Tiscali are complaining about iPlayer and are looking to achieve revenues from content providers rather than consumers. As a service, iPlayer has gone from having zero users to a reported more than a million weekly users in just nine months.
Unless either: (1) ISPs can agree on a way to market broadband clearly, so consumers can differentiate between them, and understand the benefits of more expensive packages; or (2) charge content providers for priority carriage, then ISPs will continue to struggle to make any money out of broadband directly and will have to reply on other parts of a bundle to drive profitability.
iPlayer could be the final nail in the coffin for pure-play ISPs. I don’t see blocking or degrading iPlayer as being a viable option for any ISP as it is a BBC service. So, iPlayer could drive further ISP consolidation and lead to less consumer choice.
Most pure play ISPs are small operations, Tiscali are alone among the UK’s main ISPs in being mainly a broadband play: Carphone Warehouse have a stated strategy to use broadband to drive profits from the bundled telephone service with broadband serving as an acqusition carrot; likewise VirginMedia see broadband as an acquisition tool for the other parts of their quad play; Sky plan to use broadband to deliver on demand TV; BT likewise, see broadband as a strategic plank of their business and central to retaining retail customers; Orange and O2 seek to do fixed-mobile bundles and will in time attempt to offload mobile traffic onto consumer DSL connections.
Only Tiscali is a classic ISP business and tellingly they are almost certainly up for sale.

Amazon, one of the world’s largest online retailers of physical products, is embracing digital content in each of Amazon’s original core product ranges (books, CDs, and DVDs).
Amazon now has an online movie download shop with unboxed, a DRM-free mp3 digital music shop, and now an ebook shop and device with Kindle.
This is big.
But there’s one important caveat: Unlike Amazon’s international retail presence, Amazon’s digital content shops are US-focused. None of the above are available in Europe. This gives Amazon’s rivals time to watch, learn and react, possibly with something better.
Other thought: why is it right for Amazon to drop DRM from legal music sales, but equally correct for Amazon to rely upon DRM for movies and ebooks? Especially, if different DRM systems hinders consumers, and means that ebooks bought from Amazon-owned Mobipocket will not work with Kindle?

On the role of DRM in music. We’ve published two recent reports on this topic:
European Music Executive Survey, 2007 – Reassessing the Worth of DRM

as well as the much longer vision report:
The Future of Digital Music – Fighting Free with Free

On music subscription services… We’ve been breaking out that revenue line in our forecast for some years.
Journalists – Mark is out travelling this morning but he is available for comment and analysis ahead, or after, the Apple / Emi announcement. Email us at: presseurope at jupiterkagan dot com .

Mobile operator 3, announced today a final break with its original strategy: today there was no mention of a fully walled garden and a per event charging model for media content downloads and viewing email messages.
3 announced that the X-Series line will: “…offer mobile Internet services free at the time of use, for a flat fee.” Pricing for the subscription was not announced today and will likely vary by country. 3 only announced two handsets supporting the service: the Nokia N73 and the SonyEricsson W950i; both are smartphones based on Symbian OS.
This data pricing model is similar to T-Mobile’s Web n Walk tariff, but quite unlike almost every other major European mobile operator’s data tariffs, which are typically charged per Mb at extortionate price levels. I’m sure, however, with such an all star cast in attendance today that 3 will do well with the column inches tomorrow.
Microsoft, ebay, Skype, Yahoo!, Google, Sling Media, Orb Networks, SonyEricsson and Nokia all presented. There was no sign of AOL or most of the current wave of Web 2.0 luminaries like News Corporation-owned MySpace. Youtube videos appeared within Orb Networks’ placeshifting demo.
Many of the solutions discussed and demo’ed today were not especially revolutionary or exclusive: Yahoo! Go; Windows Live Messenger; Google’s mobile portal, translator and search; ebay’s mobile interface and the Nokia and SonyEricsson handsets are all available elsewhere.
Sling however, demo’ed its Symbian video client which is, apparently a European exclusive on 3, reflecting Sling’s different market strategy in Europe compared with the US.
Skype demonstrated a completely new Skype client running on a Nokia Series 60 handset. In essence, this version of Skype is a very new application that has both tangible end user benefits and also works within the established mobile value chain. This is very much a Skype “Light” experience that has little risk of cannibalising 3’s voice or SMS revenues.
More on this in a separate post to follow.

Special Guest blog from Benjamin Lehmann:
A Belgian court has ruled against Google after a complaint was lodged regarding infringement of copyright by the Google News service. Although the ruling was issued on September 5, details only emerged yesterday. Copiepresse, who brought the case, handles copyright for the Belgian Press (French-speaking and German-speaking). The court ruled that links and summaries of articles in the Belgian Newspapers it represents, for example La Derniere Heure, La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, should be removed from Google News.
This move is not entirely unprecedented: Agence France-Presse (AFP) brought a similar case against Google last year. However, it is difficult to see what these organizations stand to gain in the long term from suing Google. By cutting themselves out of Google News, the Belgian press is only curtailing traffic to its online properties. Instead they should be competing to attract audience onto their sites via news feed aggregators, and adopting strategies to keep that audience onsite once they have arrived.
Online properties are increasingly important for newspapers seeking to target compelling younger audiences. A very small percentage of online consumers in Europe aged 15-24 are classed as heavy news readers (6 hrs plus pw), whilst over half are classed as heavy internet users. Newspapers face competition for new audiences from a growing number of news providers online, for example, portals, broadcaster online presences, news content owners, consumer generated content sites and RSS feed aggregators.
Online properties in Europe are optimizing their sites in order to attract traffic from search engines and aggregators. The large majority of newspapers in Europe are offering syndication of their content via RSS. The concern of Belgian newspapers is that deep-linking to their stories disrupts their site navigation: it allows users to circumvent the homepage, and hence avoid advertising and other sections which they would otherwise encounter en route to the story. However, it’s important to emphasize that Google news presents as much an opportunity as a threat to newspapers seeking to generate audience online. Newspapers should deploy strategies to maintain branding, engagement and advertising throughout individual stories, and seek to migrate audience from search engines and syndication feeds onsite.
Tactics for pursuing this strategy include:
a. Maintaining homepage-style navigation panels throughout site;
b. Embedding textual hyperlinks to related stories;
c. Selling banner and contextual advertising throughout the site;
d. Deploying audio and video to add value to stories.
JupiterResearch clients interested in learning more about the role of newspapers online should refer to Barry Parr’s report, The Future Of News. Alternatively, my forthcoming report, Defining The Role of Newspapers Online, will offer a European perspective on the matter.
Benjamin Lehmann,
European Content and Programming.

This is somewhat outside my official coverage, but since the lead analyst in the area, David Card, suggested I post on portals after an email conversation, I’m going to go for it…
Portals is a word that means all things to all people, but yet which the industry somehow conspires to use to exclude high traffic properties like ebay/skype or amazon.
Yes, you can argue that that’s because the latter are not media properties and derive their revenues outside of online advertising. Yet, if so, there’s a danger that any analysis of Yahoo/AOL/MSN ‘portals’ future business models will be locked into the same media-centric, ad-centric, view as the starting definition. For me, this would be a mistake. Given a choice, I’d confine the term ‘portal’ to the “bubble 1″ 1990s grave it deserves and choose a more apt term to describe their businesses.
The final irony here is that even given David’s media-centric view of ‘portals’, those sites are now re-discovering the importance of search. Their relative neglect of search gave Google its opportunity, and now Google is threatening to outflank them using search. Without a good search and site discovery feature the big ‘portals’ risk losing a major way to acquire new users for all their content and communication services, paid or ad supported. With search, the portals are returning to the fundamentals, but with a little “web 2.0″ style tagging, community, and sharing to spruce it up and improve stickiness (sorry, wrong decade, I meant “engagement”).