Seeing through the Clouds

Fifth up on Wednesday at the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference was "The Real time Challenges of Media" with a panel discussion featuring:

- Marc Landsberg, Chief Executive Officer, MRM Worldwide
- Ian Rosarius, Managing Director- TV and Content, BT
- Kevin Walsh, Chief Technology Officer, Oracle Asia Research And Development Centers

One of the more realistic discussions of The Cloud that I have heard in a conference (probably because it wasn't a Cloud conference) - some notes:

- Cloud is an "Old New Thing" - it has failed before (think thin Client, Network Computer) for the same reasons it may still fail now
- It's still far harder than anyone thinks to orchestarte processes across multiple cloud platforms
- Main benefit is not OPEX economics but CAPEX - you don't have to build to peak load [Not tortally true in my experience, Amazon still wants us to predict our unpredictable peaks]
- There is as yet no demonstrable "consumer utility" over existing "good enoughs"
- However, the Cloud is forcing rational industry behavour by driving adoption of de jure and de facto standards
- Panel felt the Cliud's main role will be to enhance the capability of the relatively "dumber" mobile devices - smartphones, tablets - than the PC/laptop ecosystem

On the evolution of Web TV, which is a specific instance of The Cloud

- TVs and other simple black box devices will take over the role currently done by complex devices (STBs, PCs)
- However it is still very early days with standards, how EPGs work etc - it is like TV in the 1950's
- What will win is the ability to provide a seamless experience - the techniology will exist long before a decent experience (Chasm description)
- There will be a period of consumer confusion, that smarter players will use to gain consumer confidence
- There is a major battle emerging about who owns the (user) data in the value chain - everyone wants it
- There will probably have to be far more work done on people's privacy, and who conyrols the data - trusted providers may well have a market benefit

The irony is that history tells you that apple are the past masters at creating the first Seamless Exoerience in media vale chain after value chain (PC, Music, Smartphone, tablet...DTV next?)

Last discussion was on good old Net Neutrailty, the point was made very clearly by BT that the current UK backbone was sized in the early noughties for low end DSL speeds not broadcast scale High Definition video to a nation, the investment to upgrade to mass big bandwidth now will be huge, and the consumer cannot bear the entire cost. Content providers who use up massive amounts of the network capacity and want real time transport will have to pay more than users with small bandwitdh, low real time synch needs [As has happened with every other utility in history].