Shifting Time, Place and Media: Seeing the Wood from the Trees

Time Shifting
Breakthroo's report suggests that the future of many DVR systems resides within incumbent services, as an augmented feature of set-top-boxes and head-end systems.

Such a scenario would indicate that DVRs are a further ‘sustaining’ opportunity to existing broadcasters. DVRs engender a – discontinuous – step-change in technology and usage, they may not disrupt service provider incumbency, from which incumbents would need to either fight or take flight (towards more premium customers).

DVR features can easily be developed by any software house, since they already exists in open source form. Many providers will attempt to leverage its capabilities, from set top box OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to retail brands, from online VoD providers to start-ups.

This rush to diffuse DVRs across market sectors by multiple competing value players will accelerate the commoditisation of basic DVR features. This will force players towards more evolved features, premium customer markets, and modularisation of previously interdependent DVR technology interfaces.

Place Shifting
According to Breakthroo's report, any service which enables a user to free himself from the constraints of consuming video from a stationary device situated in the home environment is going to be readily adopted by the innovator and early adopter market segments.

Whether such a solution is in the form of transfers from PC to mobile (or nomadic) device, file download to mobile device or streaming from a web or home server, each variation will benefit users wishing to access their favourite content while away from their homes, be they commuters, travelling business people, travellers or the general public.

Place shifting services will have different adoption and usage characteristics to other media services that confer mobility, such as iTunes / iPod, because the latter doesn’t require users total attention; users can listen on an iPod while simultaneously working or playing, whereas consumption of video requires a user’s ears, eyes and passivity.

This will likely limit video place shifting to a pattern of nomadic consumption, for instance, when users are buying or killing time, while queuing, waiting for transport, chilling-out in a café, relaxing during work breaks, and so on. A manifestation of nomadic behaviour could be that short – bite size – clips are desirable, rather than longer form movies or TV shows (in which case, it could reflect mobile entertainment usage).

Reasons why some place shifting services won’t achieve the radical diffusion of iTunes/iPod:
1. Video requires total attention which limits consumption
2. Media behemoths will be difficult to deal with in order for services to provide a rich video library – thus a convenient, end-to-end system will be slow in developing

Media Shifting
Many video file sharing solutions are already on the market, encompassing RSS and enclosures, podcasting and broadcatching. The evolution of these solutions, and the innovation of entirely new ones, is continuing apace, to produce more feature rich or more usable/convenient systems.

P2P presages an era of user-generated content, which in combination with video blogs and syndication media such as RSS, will enable more mainstream acceptance of de-centralised video, as well as catalyse de-centralised creators/distributors.

As eBay extracts profits from a huge volume of tiny transactions, so too could video aggregator services firms find profit in the ‘long tail’. Creators of original video materials, be they amateurs or firms, can take advantage of far lower costs of distribution, with a globally accessible customer base, around which they can find – and be found by – niche customers.

The complete report is available as a free download from the Breakthroo site.