[Satellite News 03-25-11] Speaking at the IP & TV World Forum in London, DirecTV Senior Vice President of Engineering Henry Derovanessian talked of the operator’s strategy to leverage its recently launched iPad application and how it is working as its TV apps store quickly reached 100,000 downloads. The DirecTV app launch, part of a satellite industry movement to develop multi-platform entertainment offerings beyond television, is scoring points with digital native consumers, according to Derovanessian
   “We also aim to have innovative integration with social sites. You can connect to friends via Twitter or Facebook and you can send a message, which they can see on their iPhone for example. So, for example, you can recommend to a friend about recording a program by sending a message via Facebook,” he said.
    The operator, which underlined its strong position in both the United States and Latin America with its 2010 full-year results, is jumping on social media to sustain its growth as user interaction in the market is rapidly changing, said Derovanessian. “There are now more smart and sophisticated ways of identifying content. The question is how do you bring everything together? We don’t view broadband as competition. We can offer more services to customers by using broadband.”
    ITI Neovision CEO Tomasz Berezowski, who manages the company’s N DTH platform in the highly competitive Polish DTH market, said that he conducted a recent trial where people could access TV services directly through the Facebook browser. “We had 1,000 users in four hours after it launched. You can have applications in Facebook. The question is how to monetize this TV service on Facebook. I can see a situation in the future where you use Facebook credits to watch a TV service. I think this environment is more open. I think the future of IP television will be social television. People can share the content and probably you can monetize this using the social networking features.”
    But unlike its peers, ITI Neovision has decided not to launch a TV app. “I can see no sense for securing content that is available in the next 15 minutes on the net,” Berezowski said.
   In the modern and integrated satellite and IP content delivery environment, satellite operators now face technical challenges in delivering multi-screen services and applications to home networks. The concept of a mobilized consumer exists even within the home, according to Derovanessian. “Consumers don’t care where the content comes from. They want seamless integration and that is a challenge that all of us face. We can decide how much we use satellite. You will see costs over time rise in terms of the delivering content over telecoms networks.”
    DirecTV hopes to showcase its innovative home delivery services through popular content offerings, such as NFL Sunday Ticket, and expand its media server concept during the next stage of the operator’s business model. “[Our strategy] is about content locally stored in the server. It is a way for the consumer to have access to one place in the house with all the content. We have a server serving all around the house. It is a central storage point for all video content to be shared throughout the home. It is an exciting technology. The home media concept allows you to deliver content to set-top box-less receivers (Connected TVs, Blu Ray players), for example.”