Personal recommendations

Regarding recommender systems, the most familiar are known to be related to audio content, i. e. personal radio. For instance, there's Pandora, which works based on manually generated metadata, and it also explains why a title was recommended. On the other hand, there's Last.fm, subtitled the social music revolution, which apparently uses some kind of collaborative filtering (a similar approach is already familiar from Amazon). In both cases, the service "learns" from user ratings to better serve the end user. Other recommendation approaches rely on communities or content analysis.

Now there may be several criteria regarding popularity of recommendation-based systems, but those that are really based on such a feature (unlike Amazon, which uses that as an additional feature to better serve their customers) seem to be dependent on two core issues: the quality of their recommendations, as experienced by the end user, and the required effort to handle available content (e. g. metadata management).

If IP based entertainment services are to succeed - as compared to good old radio or television -, personalization seems to be a must. I am sure that broadcasting companies, many of which are working on providing their programs in digital archives already, will understand this as an added value and, possibly, an opportunity to generate additional business.

IPTV - open or closed?

While some companies, such as T-Online rely on Microsoft's IPTV platform, the foundation of the OpenIPTV forum, whose founding members are AT&T Inc., Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens Networks, Sony, and Telecom Italia was announced last Monday. An excerpt of the pres release reads:

The forum (...) will focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies

Well, I'm sure that all participating companies have their own interests, so I hope that there will be a common goal (a bit more precise than what we read here). One thing seems sure to me though: IPTV has to offer an added value compared to "ordinary" television - e. g. contextual delivery of visual content on both fixed and mobile devices, and all that at affordable costs. Which means that advertisements will play a major role, perhaps dependent on how much end users are willing to invest.

The Open IPTV Forum plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications as well as protocol specifications later in 2007.

This could well be December 2007 - if taken by the word. However, I hope we'll hear something more concrete and official a bit earlier. My guess is that live broadcasting will be reduced to events where time context is crucial (e. g. sports, news). For other programs, IPTV will be more like a filtered access to archived programs (movies, documentations etc.). At least this would be an advantage for me to have the choice to watch a program depending on whether I have the time to do so - or else, leave it for later. But hey, that's only my very personal opinion.

YouTube and TV

When comparing the usage of (traditional) TV and YouTube, Harris Interactive observes that one third of frequent YouTube users are watching less TV to watch videos online. On the other hand, digital video recording, combined with harddisk storage, allows end users to become more and more time-independent when it comes to broadcast programs. Personalization of electronic program guides and online video recording as well as IPTV and triple play offers will finally lead to internet and broadcast services to merge. Time dependency seems to be only relevant for events captured live and, perhaps, news.

There is still some distinction between the type of content YouTube has to offer (mostly user generated content) and the broadcast and video world. However, as Google is expanding their collaboration with music labels and broadcasting companies (involving a share of ad revenues), we may see a further decline in TV usage among younger users.

Interestingly enough, users seem to strongly vote against the idea of airing ads before the actual video. As YouTube usage is greatest among the group hardest to reach through TV advertising, the question is how to monetize video display in the long run.

On the other hand, TV channels are expanding on delivering content online that had been broadcasted previously in an attempt to reach that part of the population that is likely not to spend their free time watching TV. I am curious who will win in the long run when it comes to collaboration between online services, telecommunication providers and content producers.

Twitter - who needs that?

Sending SMS to friends is ok, but who would want to send to Twitter what they're doing currently (limited to 160 characters)? This seems like one of the craziest collaborative services that I found recently. Or maybe I'm getting old.

Instead, I just signed up for beta-testing Joost, a client-based P2P entertainment service. Formerly, it was called The Venice Project. Not after the italian city of that name, but named after the conference room where the idea for this service was born.