Entertainment

Enthusiastic Parents Embrace IPTV for Child Education

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:59:30 -0400

Parents in South Korea have embraced IPTV as an educational tool for their children, letting their little ones watch cartoons in English and Chinese to promote fluency in those languages. KT's "Mega TV" IPTV service allows users to download and watch programs at any time, allowing students with tight schedules to watch an episode of the popular "Magic Hanja" comic book series; the heroes use 20 Chinese characters to create magic spells to defeat villains and monsters.

IPTV video-on-demand services are available from KT, Hanarotelecom and LG Dacom. Hanarotelecom started their IPTV service in 2006 and leads the market with 900,000 subscribers. KT, the largest Internet and wireline phone company in the country, is already at 580,000 subscribers and reports signing up 200,000 over the past two months.

KT sees big potential in educational TV in the market, with 20 percent of South Korean household income being spent on private education. IPTV is expected to be an affordable alternative to private classes for mid and low-income households. The company signed a contract in December to use Disney children's programming in three versions--dubbed in Korean, and originals in English with and without English subtitles.

For more:
- Read the Korea Times article here

Related article:
Korean telecoms plan $15.8 billion outlay for IPTV in 2008

ESPN expands online

Tom Burton — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:59:50 -0500

No one could accuse U.S. broadcasters of rushing to the Internet. Slowly but surely the big media brands are putting content packages on web-based channels, but with emphasis on the slowly. Disney-controlled sports giant ESPN is the latest, opening its sports portal, ESPN360.com to non-cable subscribers who have a .edu or .mil network.

ESPN relaunched its video site in September for subscribers of its cable service where the cable company has paid the required affiliate fee and plans to have 2,500 hours of live content this year. That gives the service a footprint of about 20 million users and the move to make it available to the two new domain groups is because ESPN says they can't get it though a cable provider.

On that rationale, the service should be made available to any region in the world which does not get ESPN. So why limit the service to the same old media footprint? HBO is doing something similar in its Wisconsin trial and is a replay of the early thinking when newspapers made their first tentative move online over a decade ago. Once the newspaper groups understood the online audience was almost all additional to their traditional audience the newspaper companies (mostly) embraced the net as a new channel and the big sites are now earning very good money from their ad-supported digital content. For the TV industry it has been a far more painful process, but with brands like National Geographic also starting to put their video content online, it does seem 2008 might just be the year we finally see most of the big players get onto the web.

For more:
- ESPN to offer sports events free to some web users Article
- National Geographic Channel beefs up broadband Article

Related articles:
HBO makes online video hard Report
Time Warner needs a visionary Report
Motorola says 45% of Europeans watch TV online Report

Viacom opens up Daily Show archive

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:45:14 -0400

By Tom Burton

Viacom has put online the entire eight year archive of its top rating comedy series, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a move which will be closely watched by all the major networks, advertisers, telcos and the burgeoning new media video industry.

The LA Times reports producers have being preparing since June 13,000 clips -- together with ads -- to be placed on the Daily Show's own site. The archive is searchable and free for all to use.

Non obtrusive advertisements have been placed around the content as well as a short seven second introduction, with car manufacturer, Hyundai grabbing some of the early advertising slots.

Selected excerpts had been available, but the move to totally open the popular TV series archive is the most ambitious move by a traditional media company to cash in on the burgeoning popularity of video on the internet. It follows a recent move by the New York Times to abandon its online premium subscriber service and open its entire archive, arguing advertising offered better growth prospects than subscription.

With broadband now widely available, video has emerged as a highly popular format. Entertainment TV recently surpassed news as the most popular on line video format.

Viacom is suing Google's video juggernaut YouTube for alleged copyright breaches and its move to promote its own content direct from its own branded websites represents a major strategic change for the broadcasters. Traditional media players have been reluctant to post their content fearing massive reproduction thru peer to peer networks.

Most of the major broadcasters and content producers have posted limited online inventory as they tentatively test demand, distribution and commercial models.

Viacom's decision to post its entire archive--while fighting YouTube in the courts--sets the scene for a battle between the established media players and their high profile entertainment brands against the user generated content sites, most notable YouTube.

Also watching closely the Viacom experiment will be the telco IPTV industry which has seen the market place change rapidly as the quality of online video continues to improve, with at least one platform/site, Vimeo, already offering 1280X720 HD quality direct from the browser.

Adobe is shortly to release its latest Flash Player software (beta now available), which promises MPEG 4 broadcast like quality and which will significantly improve the quality of online video for all distributors and platforms.

This threatens the attractiveness of the proprietary systems many telcos are now rolling out as part of their triple play IPTV strategies. The telcos increasingly find themselves jammed between the media companies pushing their own content brands on their own sites and the online distributors who can offer soon to be broadcast quality content across the internet.

For advertisers, the Viacom move also opens a powerful new channel to promote from and comes as Google last week launched new ad sense video units for use by online publishers and San Francisco based Blinkx released a non proprietary video ad platform for publishers.

See also discussion of this story at BoingBoing and at Slashdot