TWICE:
Where do you see the connected TV industry
five to 10 years from now?
Edmonds:
We are heading now in an area of more
consumer control and selection. In five or 10 years I
think the idea of spending $100 a month for this incredible
landfall of content being steamed at you 24/7
— less than 1 percent of which you ever watch — will go
away and consumers will be able to pick and choose
only the content that they are interested in. Once these
pipelines are built out and the infrastructure to search
and find personalized video is in place, the value of
available content will be very high. So, the practice today
of having to sign up for one of three movie services
is going to go away and consumers will have access to
their own playlists of content. I think there will be a lot
of value in the branded service providers who are able
to aggregate content and make it easy to find.
TWICE:
Some cable system operators and other
multichannel providers view the connected TV experience
as a threat to their established business models
— how are you able to work with them if you are
enabling this to take place?
Edmonds:
Many of the traditional video service providers
see this as an opportunity to move forward with
the TV Everywhere initiative. They have the content.
They have the rights after a long time negotiating with
the content producers and distributors. That’s a lot of
leverage that will take the IP video service providers a
long time to match. It takes a long time to negotiate the
rights to deliver content over broadband. If you have all
those rights already as a service provider, then it becomes
a matter of talking with the CE companies to
figure out the best way to get that content to the consumer.
It’s certainly to the cable operator’s advantage to
not have to put a $500 piece of equipment in the home.
TWICE:
Are you going to be able to provide services
like Vudu, which has its own platform approach, on
your system?
Edmonds:
We have shown that we can run a Boxee,
Vudu, Hulu or Netflix UI on our platform. That’s the direction
we are looking to take now, in partnering with
one or many of those companies to give them access to
consumer devices quickly and easily and to enrich the
content available to consumers on these devices.
