IBC 2009: moving beyond 'just TV'
At this year’s International Broadcasting Convention (IBC2009) in Amsterdam, over 1000 vendors showcased their latest products and services. It was impossible during a visit of a couple of days to take in all the innovations on display in the 12 halls, but the key message is that the TV set is undergoing its biggest transformation since it was invented in the 1920s.
The purpose of the TV set is changing fundamentally. For most of its life, the TV has been a standalone device designed solely for the passive consumption of linear broadcasting. Since the 1980s, this role has slowly been supplemented in most developed markets by the addition of various interactive services, but these have typically been constrained by low-bandwidth return paths. However, since 2005, two things have been driving a TV revolution: the majority of households in developed economies now have broadband, and high-definition TVs (HDTVs) have reached the stage of mass-market adoption.
The combination of broadband and HDTV has led to the rise of the connected TV, which can be used as the device of choice to view a wide variety of content. Increasingly, Internet-delivered content is being combined with traditional broadcast content in various forms, as widgets or overlays or, increasingly, as a source of on-demand content for pay-TV operators that do not have their own high-bandwidth bi-directional network. Within the last year, the satellite operators Canal+ and Viasat have introduced video-on-demand (VoD) services delivered through broadband-enabled set-top boxes. The vendors Pace and NDS both highlighted the rise of what NDS referred to as ‘hybridity’ – the combination of IP with traditional broadcasting technologies – as a key trend.
Source:
http://www.analysysmason.com/About-Us/News/Insight/IBC2009-moving-beyond-just-TV/