I had talked about some of the recent announcements that point to the evolution of TV Everywehre services beyond authentication and online channel availability. The recent announcements (here and here) point to wider availability of premium content (TV shows and movies) on more connected devices.
Although Verizon hasn't yet announced services that extend pay-TV offerings to devices such as connected game consoles or televisions, its Flex View feature is a start. It's a video store where VoD content (rented and purchased) can be viewed on up to five authorized devices - FiOS set-top boxes, mobile phones (currently supported models include the HTC Imagio, the Samsung Omnia 2, the Blackberry Storm 2, the DROID X, the DROID 2, and Windows Mobile 6.5 handsets), PCs/laptops/netbooks, and Windows® PlayReady® compatible portable media players. It's an interesting concept, where content can be purchased/rented from any of these devices and viewed on any of them as well. From our recent studies (TV 2.0: The Consumer Perspective and All Eyes on Video), we know that there is good demand for multi-platform VoD services, so I would expect Verizon's lead to be followed quickly by other operators.
This pursuit of solutions to bring wider availability of content and viewing experiences in the digital realm is moving quickly to "cloud media" concepts, where consumers will have the capability of virtually hosting all of their media content and content owners and producers have more efficient ways of producing and delivering their content, not only on an enterprise-wide basis, but also straight to consumers. I had an interesting briefing with HP regarding their Media Cloud solutions today. HP is aiming many of its assets at this space, looking at production, post-production, content management, multi-screen delivery, business intelligence, and consumer-facing services such as video access on multiple consumer electronics and RS-DVR features. From both the consumer services perspective and the infrastructure play, this will be an incredibly interesting area to be watching in coming months.
