IPTV needs more chaos

OPEN ACCESS over IPTV to consumers would be a structured anarchy for the industry, Sefy Ariely of Orca Interactive said this afternoon. A horizontal, co-operative model for accessing the consumer would work far better than a vertical relationship - in this situation, the pseudo-anarchy would pay.

Ariely was talking about building vendor relationships between network service providers, who provide the physical platform for IPTV, and video service providers, who provide the content to go on them. Each had complementary responsibilities: the VSP to provide compelling programming and the NSP to promote that platform to as wide an audience as possible.

This dichotemy reflected general best practice business principles of focusing on "core competencies".

Various technical challenges were still to be overcome, he told listeners. NSPs had to work with multiple VSPs to make sure their user interfaces all worked in a coherent way so that the transition between channels provided by VSPs was seamless and intuitive for the consumer. Business challenges, such as the billing relationship with and ownership of the consumer, also needed to be thrashed out in each market. µ