I have found vendor user group meetings can be as every bit as valuable as for-pay conferences. The Entone User’s Group meeting held in the convenient, historic and revitalized downtown St. Louis last week, was extremely valuable for the participants, who included Entone customers, prospects and partners. Entone has been a long-time supporter and sponsor of the Viodi View and ViodiTV and it was an honor to moderate a couple of the panels at this event and I enjoyed the interactive nature of the panels, as well as the openess of the discussions. 

Steve McKay, CEO of Entone, kicked off the conference by suggesting that Triple Play has become a zero sum game and that operators will need to continue to refine their offering to compete. McKay emphasized the importance of a whole-home media offering for operators as they seek to differentiate themselves from CATV and DBS.   Features of this offering include DVR, ability to view over the top videos, inclusion of personal media, in-home distribution and place-shifting tied together with an integrated and easy to use interface that only requires one simple-to-use remote. What McKay is calling for is not trivial and he called on the operators to push the vendor community for these sorts of whole home media devices. 

Colin Dixon of The Diffusion Group gave backed up McKay’s comments with some interesting data, particularly on home networks (going from 150 million in 2010 to 1 billion in 2030). Dixon stated that, "The PC is not and will not be the center of the home entertainment universe. The PC is a disabler." He suggested a much more TV-centric view of where over the top video is going, when he suggeested something like 12% of broadband viewers are watching 5 or more hours of video on the Internet per day and 84% of people who watch video on broadband want it on TV. 

Along these lines, he emphasized, "That the Internet is transitioning from a technology to a medium." He called what is happening the greatest realignment of television services in 60 years. He suggested that, "Bringing the web to TV is a losing proposition, while bringing the TV experience through the web is a winning proposition." To bolster this argument, he cited TDG’s primary research that suggests more than 3/4 of people prefer to watch DVDs in a social setting some or all of the time. His point was that new media must leverage existing behavior to be successful. He stressed the importance of the guide in helping people to discover content, as opposed to searching which is difficult with a television interface. He also called on telcos to look at new kinds of programming, such as gaming.  

Dixon provided an excellent overview of the entire over-the-top value chain, from content ingest to content delivery. It was a great set-up to my conversation about independent telcos and what they are doing in terms of local content. Several of the telcos in the audience mentioned that they are utilizing their VOD servers to store and stream local content. And local content is a differentiator, but it may not always be enough to keep a customer from churning. 

Doug Abolt described Consolidated Communications‘ process of how they mine their data to determine which customers are likely to churn. This has allowed them to target their marketing dollars and offers, such that they are able to get a better return on those investments. At the same time, there have been unexpected benefits, like identifying weak points in their networks. He described the virtual focus groups that are part of this process as being much more efficient, less costly and timelier than the traditional focus group. Abolt’s presentation was a good exclamation point on a couple of very productive days of learning.