News ed eventi
The analogue switch-off will present a major disruption in the habits of TV viewer.
We spoke recently to Giovanni Moglia, President of the newly-formed Italian Association of IPTV operators, and also Director for Legal & Regulatory Affairs at FASTWEB, one of the founding members of the association, to hear his thoughts on the changing Italian IPTV landscape.
Mr. Moglia is an expert in economic law, with a special focus on competition and market regulation. Mr. Moglia has previously been involved in the creation of the Italian Competition & Market Authority, where one of his appointments was as head of the Telecommunications & IT Division, and has more recently worked as Director of Institutional Affairs at Wind, where he supervised preparation of the tender for the assignment of Italy's third mobile phone operating license.
FASTWEB was one of the first European operators to launch IPTV services in the region, and as such has witnessed the teething troubles and development of IPTV right from the outset. What progress do you think the IPTV industry as a whole has made in the past 12 months?
GM: FASTWEB launched its service in 2001 and since then has developed relevant experience not only from a technical point of view but, more importantly, on how IPTV should be positioned in the market. After a long trial and error phase, I believe that in the past 12-18 months IPTV has found its right format, which on one hand leverages the potential of the platform (its interactivity and the level of personalisation you can achieve) while at the same time giving it specific features that differentiate it from the Web TV models. At the beginning, IPTV was used to rebroadcast traditional linear channels in an attempt to replicate the same packages available on the broadcast platforms.
More recently, also as a result of the fact that broadcasters and content providers have understood the potential of the platform for them, IPTV has focused specifically on a different model based on on-demand content. On top of the on-demand offer created by the operators themselves, all the IPTV operators are reaching deals with other pay-TV aggregators available on the market (e.g. SKY Italia, Mediaset Premium) in order to distribute their offers through the IPTV platform. The idea is to create a basic offer provided by the IPTV operator and at the same time allow the possibility to subscribe to pay-TV offers of third party aggregators in order to give the customers the benefits of a "one-stop-shop" approach.
What do you think the IPTV industry - including technology vendors, operators and content providers - should focus on achieving in the next 12 months, in order to make further progress within the pay-TV space?
As far as Italy is concerned, IPTV operators have to focus on developing an offer and a common strategy to take advantage of the upcoming switch-off of analogue television transmissions. The switch-off will represent a major disruption in the habits of TV viewers and force most families, even the less technological advanced ones, to purchase a digital device to keep receiving television. We believe that this is an amazing opportunity to expand the penetration of IPTV and we are working as an association to seize this opportunity by establishing, for instance, partnership projects with the local administrations in the switch-off areas and similar initiatives. These partnerships will allow, for instance, the families in the switch-off areas to get information about the switch to digital through the communications and commercial channels of the IPTV operators.
From your point of view, what impediments are you encountering in the development of FASTWEB TV?
Italy was one of the first countries to launch IPTV and still the growth in terms of subscriber numbers has been quite slow so far. This is due in the first place to the specific context: Italian consumers are not familiar with the concept of cable TV, having been for many years an almost exclusively DTT country. On top of that the whole concept of the on-demand programmes, either included in the subscription or on a pay-per-use basis, is more complicated to communicate compared to more traditional pay-TV services. As a result the awareness of what IPTV is and the features of the platform is - in Italy - still quite low. Another critical issue is the negotiation of rights: since the beginning, due to the peculiar environment of pay-TV in Italy, the multiplatform rights to most, if not all, linear channels, have been acquired by SKY Italia, which enjoys a quasi-monopolistic position on the market. It took FASTWEB a long time and hard work to be able to put together an offer, ant this has been achieved mainly through the acquisition of on-demand rights that, unlike the rights for linear distribution, were still available.
Do you think that, within Europe, consumers are beginning to understand the capabilities and benefits of an IPTV platform, or are we still at the early adopter phase?
IPTV has changed considerably in the past few years and has been focusing more and more on subscription on-demand channels, i.e. libraries of content that the subscribers to the service can access unlimitedly when they want to watch them. We strongly believe that this freedom from the rigidity of the TV schedule is a compelling consumer proposition. The pattern of consumption of our customer base shows that once they start consuming content from our VOD and SVOD libraries they tend to watch less live TV, which is a strong indicator that once the subscribers get used to the benefit of the on-demand model, it is hard to switch back. The big challenge is to communicate effectively the advantages of the IPTV to the mass market: in our experience when it comes to TV, it is still the content that pushes the customer to adopt the service rather than functionalities or technological features, therefore some of the benefits of the IPTV are understood and appreciated only after the subscription.
What are you planning for FASTWEB TV in the next 12 months, in terms of service expansion?
In the past year we have tried an innovative model that we defined as "branded VOD channels": rather than having a Major providing content (TV series, entertainment or children programming) that we use to build our own on-demand libraries, they provide us with a full editorial product: a portal for which it’s the Major that creates the libraries, refreshing the content on regular basis and according to rules mutually agreed between the parties. In our view this is a way to take the best of two worlds: the editorial approach of the traditional channels (the content is selected and refreshed and the viewer is guided through its consumption) while maintaining the full flexibility for the customer that can access the content when they prefer. This model is proving more effective than having huge libraries of content which are less easy to navigate. We have already created these branded portals with Warner, Disney and Sony television, and we are seeking similar deals with other content providers.
The Italian Association of IPTV Operators will be represented at this year's IPTV World Forum by Lisa Di Feliciantonio, a member of the board for the association and a colleague of Mr. Moglia's at FASTWEB, where she is Head of Content and IPTV Regulation.
The IPTV World Forum (www.iptv-forum) is the world's leading IPTV event, attracting over 5,500 attendees from 76 countries in 2008.
