Capria TV

Both Apple and Avid cited the same reasons for taking a pass at this year’s NAB convention, claiming they can spend valuable marketing dollars meeting customers in smaller venues. Avid expected to spend $6 million in Vegas before pulling the plug, averaging just about $60 per attendee.

Taken at face value, the companies’ decisions make sense. Let’s face it. How many of us get any information in the booth that we can’t get online from our hotel rooms? Booth presentations are so tightly scripted that by Wednesday my colleagues and I have most of them memorized. There’s nothing to learn in the booth, and quite often the presenter knows nothing more than the script.

Those offices camouflaged within the giant set pieces throughout the booth are another story. That’s where the suits court the checkbooks. Avid’s booth attracts checkbooks. Last year Avid may not have made any groundbreaking announcements at NAB, but tumbleweeds certainly weren’t drifting through the booth either. Sell a couple of dozen Interplay installs, a hundred or so Unity Isis systems, and, more importantly, get a bunch of qualified leads for large facility installations, and that $6 million isn’t too badly spent.

Is there another reason why Avid opted out?

For Apple, the overwhelming bulk of its sales are $1,300 boxes of software, and while a goodly number of broadcast executives come to kick the tires at the Apple booth, they must driven to distraction by the ironic t-shirt, thick-framed glasses, iPod-toting crowd three deep at every station. The Apple booth at NAB in recent years looks more like the Apple Store on Black Friday than a gathering of broadcasters.

In fact, even Apple’s big Sunday press conference has taken on the personality of a rock concert. Nearly everyone attending NAB can attend the press event. It’s hard not to get invited. The place is loaded with giddy fans. Every announcement is followed by wild applause. Even features that have been in competing products for years are received like the heralding of the invention of the wheel. Don’t get me wrong. The products are worthy, it’s just the crowd often doesn’t understand why. Apple’s wildly profitable. An annual $6 million expenditure on Kool-Aid isn’t likely to get investors complaining.

So why did Apple pull the plug?

As a consumer device, Apple TV is a typical first generation technology endeavor. Basically Apple took the iPod formula and applied it to IPTV—create a basic, no frills piece of hardware in an elegant wrapper, but give it a best in class UI.

This approach worked for the iPod because an easy to use MP3 player had an easily understandable value proposition to consumers. People wanted these devices, but the market was doing a terrible job meeting those needs. The iPod swooped in and took control of the market.

There’s not a lot of pent up demand for an IPTV device because

1. No one knows what IPTV is.


2. Very few people want another set top box (STB) clutter their living rooms.


3. Video on demand (VOD) and pay per view (PPV) are doing a solid job of filling Apple TV’s niche.


4. There’s always NetFlix.

Mike Curtis did a nice review on the latest Apple TV update, and linked to some interesting information on Apple TV as a consumer device. No need to recap that. Instead, let’s look at what Apple TV’s success or failure means to independent content creators.

IPTV can be the great equalizer for independents. It has the potential to distribution affordable for even the smallest players. Unfortunately the iTunes store is not independent-friendly. Apple’s been unwilling to adopt the Amazon and Yahoo! models of renting space to retailers. If you’re not big media, you’re not welcome in iTunes—unless you’re willing to give your content away. That means adopting an ad-based model, and that means more work for the independent producer.

Enter the Open Television Network

The recently launched Open Television Network takes care of all the e-commerce infrastructure, so independents can sell content for download. Once an Open Television account has been created, to the user, it’s just like buying through iTunes. Very elegant.

The content owner supplies his or her own storage, gets a listing in the Open Television index, and is free to market independently. To date it’s the most open, elegant, and affordable means of delivering IPTV content available to content owners. Open Television takes a very reasonable 15% cut of sales. Try getting a deal like that with a traditional distributor.

Whether Open Television becomes the dominant platform or not, it has opened up IPTV to the independent.