Digital Hollywood pins hope on open access

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Like all things wireless these days, most of this week’s more poignant exchanges at Digital Hollywood have been anchored around the idea of open– opening up carrier networks, devices, content and the Internet gateway where all these things must connect without restriction.
“The future is going to allow us to carry our content with us, access it wherever we want, to use it different ways,” Alex Ben Block, a columnist and show business historian for Hollywood Today, said in a forum he moderated Tuesday.
And perhaps later he summarized best why telecom, technology, wireless and TV and cable networks haven’t come together on this issue. “Everyone’s drunk on the idea that everything should be free on the Internet,” he said near the end of the discussion.
And so just how do all these industries plan to meet in the middle and deal with these barriers? Just take AT&T Inc. for example.
Franz Kurath, an AT&T executive focused on the company’s wireline business, particularly its IPTV offering, admits there are plenty of integration problems internally, let alone outside forces. Even though AT&T has a full lineup of video through its online, IPTV and mobile properties, it’s not delivering all those services in a device-agnostic, fully open ecosystem.
“It falls short of the ubiquity in the sense that you can have different content offerings,” Kurath said. “There’s a great opportunity to create that seamless environment, but there’s still a long way to go.”
Kurath said AT&T is working with outside content providers to ensure dollars get divvied out correctly as it tries to open up a system that allows customers to one day buy a piece of content and take it with them anywhere on any device.
“We know that there’s a huge demand and opportunity, but there are huge costs,” he said. “There are true costs associated with delivering that content.”
Still, all signs point toward open access down the road.
“The death grip operators have had over content is finally being relaxed,” Bill Stone, CEO of Handango Inc., said earlier at the conference.
Saying “today, it’s too damn hard to get to the content,” Stone said he’s hopeful that carriers in the United States will take cues from their counterparts in Europe and Asia.
“Content is king, but distribution is the emperor,” Stone added.
Pete Kocks, who runs Truveo, an AOL L.L.C.-owned company that indexes videos online, said broadband speeds in the United States are partly to blame for the incomparable adoption rates to abroad.
“In the United States, what we call broadband is not what they call broadband in the rest of the world, the rest of the developed world,” Kocks said. “That’s one major reason why video internationally has done well.”
Plus, there’s a wave of content now becoming available in other countries where that content may have never been available before, he added.
“The amount of video that’s online is just huge,” he said.
At least one content guy, Kelly Egan, VP of business development at Swarmcast, came to the defense of carriers.
Gatekeepers exist to remind everyone of the business models surrounding media and content, Egan said.
“These are there to remind you that this content isn’t coming for free, more importantly it’s there to enforce a business model” that makes it possible for that content to exist, he said.
“I don’t think gatekeepers are bad at all, because we need them,” Egan said, adding that the real question is where the goal posts will be moved to bring more players to the field.
Rob Hayes, senior VP and general manager at Showtime’s digital media group, said walled gardens have been getting cut down for years. And like so many, he pins much of the recent progress squarely on the success of Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
“The carriers are realizing now, once you get that free, open access through the iPhone, you don’t want to be in that walled garden,” he said. “You don’t necessarily have to work with the carriers as much as you did in the past because you can create your own experience.”
Still, Hayes is no cheerleader for video across all cellphones, particularly low-end handsets.
“The viewing experience on cellphones; it’s not the best experience,” he said, then following up with a story about how much he enjoyed watching a film on his iPhone during his flight to Los Angeles for this week’s conference.
“I wouldn’t watch that on a cellphone, but I would watch it on an iPhone,” he said. “That experience on a regular cellphone would be a terrible experience.”