News ed eventi
The launch of IPTV services by the incumbent and other major fixed-line operators has been excellent news.
In another of our weekly interviews with IPTV operators confirmed to attend this year's IPTV World Forum, taking place in London next week, we speak to Lisa Di Feliciantonio, Head of Content and IPTV Regulation at Italian telco FASTWEB.
Lisa is also a Member of the Board for the recently-formed Italian association of IPTV operators. In her current position she is in charge of guaranteeing the compliance of FASTWEB's IPTV operations with the existing regulatory framework as well as monitoring the evolution of policy and regulatory environment to identify opportunities for the further development of FASTWEB IPTV offer.
Before joining FASTWEB, Lisa has worked for the Italian Regulatory Authority for Communications (AGCOM) as counsellor to one of the Commissioners and, later, as executive officer in the Regulatory Department, where she was in charge for the implementation of the regulatory framework for electronic networks in the television sector. In her role, Lisa has directly taken part in the drafting of existing regulation for licensing, content regulation, obligation of broadcasters and the transition to digital television.
What in your opinion has been the biggest regulatory challenge to delivering IPTV services in Italy during the past 12-24 months?
LDF: The lack of a clear must-offer obligation for free-to-air channels. Currently, in order to include FTA channels broadcast on analogue or digital terrestrial networks, IPTV operators need to negotiate licensing agreement and broadcasters require huge upfront payments. This has been partly solved through a technological solution rather than a regulatory one: the introduction of the hybrid DTT-IPTV set-top box and the progressive phase out of first-generation IPTV-only set-top boxes will reduce the market power of the broadcasters.
In terms of content, do you believe that the best strategy for increasing the subscriber base for an IPTV service is acquiring premium or exclusive content that consumers cannot find anywhere else? Or is this strategy too slow in delivering a viable return on investment, in the short term?
Currently, most IPTV operators are not pursuing an "exclusive content" strategy, for both financial and strategic reasons. IPTV should be a way to create additional revenue streams for telcos, therefore we need to be very careful in assessing payback times and return on investments, especially when it comes to content acquisition, which is the single most important cost item in the P&L statement of an IPTV operator. Given the relative market position of IPTV operators, exclusivity would involve huge and disproportionate premium prices that would most likely lead to value destruction rather than value creation.
The major strength of an IPTV platform is its capability to give the customer a "superpower" that is the ability to create his or her own schedule by offering access to thousands of titles in SVOD and VOD libraries. This is a powerful leverage to use and gives new value also to "second windows" content, which has been already broadcast on other pay-TV offers or also on free-to-air. This does not mean that any content would work on IPTV. We have learned what customers want and constantly fine-tune our offer accordingly. We have also learned that customers appreciate some sort of "editorial" guidance to the content.
In the end, it’s a matter of finding the right trade off between having thousands of titles always available in a pure "long tail approach" and more limited libraries constantly refreshed.
What impelled FASTWEB and others to set up the Italian Association of IPTV Operators? Was it driven by a need to cooperate in order to overcome specific obstacles?
Mostly a "shared" vision of the market and the role of IPTV in the Italian audiovisual and pay-TV context. IPTV has developed slowly in Italy also because FASTWEB has been for a long time the only telco provider to incorporate an audiovisual service in its offer. The launch of IPTV services by the incumbent and the other major fixed-line operators has therefore been excellent news. The Association wants to create awareness in the market and with the policy makers regarding the potential of IPTV and its role in the industry value chain.
So far, IPTV has not been perceived as an enabler but rather as a "closed", vertically integrated platform in competition with other platforms. This is not the way we see ourselves. All IPTV players are creating partnerships with content aggregators and content providers to establish IP as an open delivery platform through which the customer can see free-to-air content, access interactive web-based applications or subscribe any pay-TV offer available on the market. This "one stop shop" approach will help position IPTV as a technological enabler, and support the idea that audiovisual content is mainly a way to exploit the power of IP networks and in the future create the business case for ultra-high bandwidth next-generation networks (NGNs).
Where do you see the Italian IPTV industry going in the next few years? Do you think that FASTWEB and other IPTV operators will have to incorporate over-the-top video into their services in order to keep up with the explosive growth of Internet video?
IPTV has the potential to incorporate the "IP" part as well as the "TV" part without a huge change of strategies. Customers appreciate the idea of being able to enjoy some of the content they find on the Internet on their TV screen. This strengthens once again the role of the IPTV operator as a technological enabler rather than simply a content aggregator. Ultimately it is an opportunity rather than a challenge.
What would you like to see the IPTV industry focus on achieving in the next 12 months?
As far as Italy is concerned, IPTV is not a differentiator but rather a way to create loyalty, additional revenue streams and improve the customer experience. In the medium to long term I believe that a progressive standardisation of technologies, platforms and possibly market proposition is the key to turning IPTV into a mass market proposition.
Ms Di Feliciantonio will be participating in the panel session "Aligning Access Strategy, Content Strategy & Market Conditions" taking place on Day 2 (March 26th) of the IPTV World Forum conference.
The IPTV World Forum (www.iptv-forum) is the world's leading IPTV and IP video event, attracting over 5,500 attendees from 76 countries in 2008.
