The MadeForOne.com newsletter provides personalization news and information straight to your mailbox. Subscribe Now!
Mass customization and personalization news
|| Directory
2005-03-05 - Maynard, Mass., USA: In the coming week, the inaugural IPTV World Forum convenes in London with network operators, content producers and technology providers exploring the dynamics of IP television.
The focus of the IPTV World Forum is helping operators to partner with technology and content providers to deliver a compelling IPTV service proposition. Trials and deployments of IPTV in Europe and worldwide are underway. The technologies have become established and proven, and now the industry looks to focus on service delivery, marketing and bundling the triple play, protecting content and delivering interactive services.
Vidoe on Demand (VOD) services are rapidly expanding, spanning national and local television, sports and news, special events and niche programming, in addition to movies. Rather than having to watch a television programme when it is scheduled by a network, VOD allows television viewers a much higher degree of personalized control over what they view and when they view it. Were VOD to be universally adopted, it could herald an end to the need to record programmes, as they could instead be downloaded for viewing at any time.
One company, SeaChange International, Inc. (Nasdaq: SEAC) will bring the conference focus to video-on-demand services and their experience in digital television worldwide. In the IPTV World Forum session "More Than Just Movies: On-Demand Television Opportunities for Operators, Studios, Broadcasters and Advertisers," SeaChange's Yvette Kanouff, corporate vice president of strategic planning, will survey the numerous business models that have propelled VOD usage in millions of digital television homes and established new revenue opportunities for network operators and others in the business of television.
"Operators everywhere are giving subscribers personal control of an increasingly broad and creative variety of on-demand entertainment and information to televisions, PCs and other devices," said Kanouff. "From music videos, to high school sports, to video dating personals, SeaChange's VOD customers have grown the business far beyond movies to attract and serve new audiences in new ways."
Also at IPTV World Forum, executives from British Telecom, the BBC, City Telecom of Hong Kong, Telekom Austria and Warner Brothers, among others, will deliver keynotes and presentations highlighting IPTV goals, case studies and best practices. Andy Birchall, chairman of SeaChange's London-based content partner On Demand Group, will deliver an overview of Europe's on-demand television services.
SeaChange VOD Systems are the foundation for the majority of commercial on-demand television services around the world. In more than 100 operations, they fulfill over 100 million subscriber stream requests each month. SeaChange's on-demand customers include some of the world's largest broadband operators such as Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, Insight, Rogers and Time Warner Cable in North America and HOT (Israel), ntl (U.K.), Qrix (So. Korea) and Telewest (U.K.), among others. Operators choose SeaChange's video server systems and revenue-generating software applications to run fully automated, fault-resilient streaming services to televisions, PCs and other consumer devices.
