Taiwan’s HTC, currently number five in worldwide smartphone shipments, wants to differentiate itself by working with the companies who deliver the content users want most on their smart devices. After investing in Beats Audio last year, HTC yesterday said it would take a 20% stake in SyncTV, a leading over-the-top video provider. (Photo courtesy teeveetee.com)
“HTC has built a lot of video capable devices. We are all about enabling premium content to go over the Internet to multiple screens, so there is a lot of synergy,” says SyncTV CEO Alexander Garcia-Tobar. Garcia-Tobar told RCR that SyncTV’s apps are device agnostic, meaning that down the road HTC devices using SyncTV technology should be able to communicate with other connected devices. He believes that as smart devices evolve, consumers will want to watch content from one provider on another provider’s devices. “The ecosystem will go through a lot of stages,” he says. “Right now it is the wild, wild west. Cable companies can be created out of the blue. Next will come consolidation. We’ll probably see an Apple solution, an Android/Google solution, and possibly a Cisco solution set. Eventually they will all have to play nice together.”
“After several years of people talking about this space and talking about it taking off, its really exciting to us to see what’s happening in the last 6 months,” says Garcia-Tobar. “Where the world is going right now is to a very video-centric type of world. Last year only about 20% of our deployments involved live video; this year over half of them do.”
Internet-connected TVs are becoming more than vehicles for viewing traditional media. “The role of smart TVs has expanded well beyond video-on-demand,” says Kurt Scherf, VP, principal analyst, Parks Associates. A 2011 Smart TV survey conducted by Parks Associates shows that in addition to streaming movies and tv shows, more than half of Americans with smart TVs use them for social networking, photo sharing, games, and watching video that they have produced.
The long-term success of over-the-top video providers in the US may be partially dependent on the regulatory environment, which Garcia-Tobar says is stricter than most overseas environments. Like its top competitors Rovi Corporation (ROVI) and KIT digital (KITD), SyncTV has done many of its initial OTT video deals with companies outside the United States.
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