As usual, Tracy Swedlow put on another great TVOT event this year – thanks Tracy! TVOT 2010 was particularly interesting because of the dynamic changes in the market, such as the debate between cable and OTT (including CE manufacturers and others). While there was a lot to pick up, here are my top 5 takeaways:
- If you’re a software application or have content and programming to distribute, it’s best to bet on all the horses – cable, managed IPTV, OTT including connected TVs, DBS and Widget stores. Each has its own strength across different demographic audiences. If your goal is be relevant for 13-65 year olds, you need to be working in multiple camps.
- If you’re a consumer, these are promising times as everyone wants to bring you something better – but they’re far from perfect times. You may be still stuck with a monthly bill from your cable company and not getting all you want when you want. While some of the alternative solutions like OTT are new and not yet in the “easy to use” (certainly not easy to activate) category, they are improving by adding more content and working on ways to be more seamless and easy to use.
- Communication is clearly emerging as its own category. Widget stores, connected TVs and more all have Facebook and Twitter – it’s almost as if it’s old news to have those embedded services. Now the question is: how do widget stores, OTT, CE and others differentiate from one another? It appears solutions are out there but each company needs to make the “onboarding” or time launch easy and simple.
- Open platforms are clearly the direction things are going – OTT providers and widget stores are making significant strides to quickly deliver new services. EBIF is creating a lot of smoke, now we’ll see if a fire starts as 2010 has been teed up as the year for Interactive TV (Yes, again. No, I don’t know how many years running that this has been “THE year for iTV ”)
- 3D TV continues to make headlines – apparently the glasses will be compatible with different TVs. We’ll see how fast this takes off…seems like consumers have spent a lot of $$ recently to get to HDTV.
Were you at TVOT? What were your top takeaways?
