Reaching Multiple Screen Convergence: Streaming to the PC, Mobile, Television, and Gaming Devices, Panel Discussion

Track A: Technology
16:00-17:00

Moderator:
Martin Sutherland, Director, European Sales, Vantrix
Panel:
Pierre-Yves Le Berre, VP Business Development
AneviaMr James A Neufeld, Product Specialist, never.no
Jim Taylor, Chief Technologist, Sonic Solutions International Digital Media Alliance (IDMA)

The panel discussion touched on topics that relate to multi-channel distribution, or "Three Screen Convergence" how it was called.
There was talk about three sides that are involved in the distribution: Content provider, technology provider and bandwidth provider. Another (perhaps golden) triangle there.

DRM seems to be a big issue for video service implementations nowadays, that is of course especially true for the three-screen case, as missing standardisation makes multi-channel distribution especially expensive. DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) is an initiative that tries to achieve an ecosystem based on a common DRM standard, compared to the ecosystem around formats like DVD. Read about it this Digital Beat blog entry.

Using different but synchronized representations of the same content for the different target devices is seen as good practice. Concentrating on the strengths of the different devices this can make the devices complementary and stimulate even viewing the content on several devices simultaneously. Secondary devices like mobile are preferred for interaction and community-building around the content shown on the big screen.

The requirement of a convergent software platform that makes it easy to synchronize all the screens was brought up. It was agreed that the technology is actually there as of today, but problems are missing business models, low adaption and especially lack of standardisation (which would reduce cost vastly). So currently the convergence is more on the network level and in the possibility to synchronize the content between the screens on an application level. The next step has to be format standardisation, but it was agreed that as of now a format war coming up is unavoidable, that of course will hinder market growth in the a couple of years to come.

One general problem was brought up by Mr. Le Berre: Telcos are generally having a problem with any of the video or high-bandwidth phenomena in the sense that they see themselves as the losers in the equation, having to build up their bandwidth without making money with that. Interesting in conjunction with the unwillingness to embrace Multicasting. As a Telco employee Mr. Le Berre wants to see IMS as the next step towards convergence giving the ISPs control over the different content types, so that video, gaming or voice-over-ip traffic can be charged at different(higher) rates than the rest of the data traffic.