This week’s New Media Age makes quite interesting reading for various reasons – some of which I’ll go through separately, not least the interview with David Elstein.
But there’s an interesting piece by Guy Phillipson of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), an organisation who’s role is to “work with our members to ensure marketers can easily identify the best role for online and help them engage their customers and build their brands, through a combination of resources and events.”
The piece talks about the upsurge in IPTV, and goes on to say that it has published a comprehensive report on the emerging IPTV market in the UK. A note at the end of the piece says that the report “IPTV: The Emerging UK Market” is available from iabuk.net.
Well that sounds worth reading, so off I trot to their website. The report is clearly highlighted on their front page, and I go off to read more. At the foot of the page is a link to a Word document which is an IPTV FAQ. But just above that is a link that says: “IAB members can download the full ipTV: The Emerging Market report from our knowledge bank on our website.”
I follow the link but am confronted with a login page. Oh well, the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) also makes you register. I fundamentally disagree with this policy since the organisation’s raison d’etre to encourage marketeers and advertisers to use radio as a medium, and anything that makes it even trivially hard to get the information about advertising that they need means that it’s harder to get that all important advertising. But registration’s free and once in, there is a wealth of information freely available to advertisers, marketeers or simply the curious (if you can find your way around the appalling layed-out site).
So I try to register with the IAB.
Nope. I’m from an “Unapproved Member Domain”. You see, I’m not actually from a member organisation. Of course I could be a company looking for information about how I can make IPTV work for me. But the IAB’s not going to help me out.
Rubbish.
Interestingly, the four page Word document I can download says this in answer to “What is IPTV?”
…Is it the delivery of programming over a closed network to a TV set-top box, or is it the viewing of video content via the open network of the world wide web on a PC monitor?
Whilst these two different models are often interchangeably labelled ipTV, it is the former that lays stronger claim to the term. ipTV is a closed, proprietary TV system such as those present today on cable or satellite services but instead delivered through IP technology over a secure network…
So the IAB is very much trying to say is that it’s content delivered to your TV set rather than your PC. Yet few of us actually watch streamed content via IP on their TV sets (unless we’ve got Homechoice Tiscali or Telewest Teleport or something).
I find that a rather limiting definition. Technically it may be correct, but if I’m watching the BBC’s Player or streaming Channel 4, is that not also IPTV?
Incidentally, why indeed is IPTV all falling under the IAB’s auspices anyway? If I were Thinkbox, television’s marketing body, I’d be getting into IPTV big-time. One for TV buyers and New Media buyers to fight over I guess.
Oh, and I note that Thinkbox’s website is completely registration and membership free. It seems that “New” media has something to learn from “old” media after all!