Introduction – Dean Pemberton, InternetNZ
Dean was going to do an intro but got cock-blocked by some guy in a High-Vis vest.
The People Factor: what users want – Paul Brislen, ex-CEO of TUANZ
- Working from home since 1999, 30kb/s at first. Made it work
- Currently has 10Mb/s shared with busy family, often congested, not using much TV yet
- Television driving demand.
- Some infrastructure showing the strain
- Southern cross replacement will be via Sydney. A couple of thousand km in the wrong direction when going to the US
- Rural broadband still to deliver on the promise, no uptake stats, not great service level
- Internet access critical path for economic development. lack of political will
- Dean got to do his intro talk now.
- Will Internet be priced on peak usage? A: Already offpeak discounts, some ISPs manage home/biz customer ratio to keep traffic balanced
- Average usage per customer is 5Mb/s for ISP with streaming orientated ISP (acct sold with device).
- 60% of International traffic going to Aus (to CDNS)
- Consumers don’t accept buffering, high quality video (bitrate and production quality). Want TV to just-work.
- NZ doesn’t want to be a “rural” level of internet access, equiv to a farm in more connected countries
- Could multicast work for live events like sport?
- Hard to get overage to work to work when people leave TV on all day
- Plenty of people in Auckland not getting UFB till 2017 (or later)
The connected home and the Internet of Things – Amber Craig, ANZ
- At top of Hype cycle
- Has home Switches on Wemo (have to get upgraded)
- Lots of devices generating a lot of data
- Video Blogging – 10GB of raw data, 1GB of finished for just 5 minutes. Uploading to shared drives, sending back and forth through multiple edits
- Network capacity if probably not much for IoT compared to video, but home will be a source of a lot more uploads
- With IPv6 maybe less NAT, harder to manage (since people are not used to it).
- Whose responsibility is it to ensure that Internet works in every room
- Building standards, what are customers, government, ISP each prepared to pay for?
- What about medical dependency people who need Internet. A lot of this goes over GSM since that is more “reliable”
Lightbox – content delivery in New Zealand – Kym Nyblock, Chief Executive of Lightbox
- Lightbox is part of Spark ventures, morepork, skinny, bigpipe
- Lighbox – On line TV service, $12.99/month thousands of hours of online content
- 40% of US household have SVOD, but pay-TV only down 25%
- Many providers around the world, multiple providers in many countries. Youtube also bit player in the corner
- SVOD have some impact on piracy, especially those who only pirate cause they want content same day as programme airs in the US
- Lots of screens now in the house, TV not only viewed on TVs
- Lightbox challenges
- Rights issues, lots of competition with other providers, some with fuzzy launch dates
- NZ Internet not too bad
- Had to work within an existing company
- Existing providers
- Sky – 850k homes, announced own product, has most sports
- Netflix – approx 30k homes, coming to NZ soon
- From Biz plan to launch in 12 months
- Marketing job to be very simple – “Grandma Rule” ( can be explained to Grandma, used by her)
- Express service delivers content right after views in the US. Lots of views for the episodes that are brand new. One new episode can be 10% of days total views
- Very agile company, plans changed a lot.
- Future
- Customers will have several providers and change often
- Multiple providers in the market, more to come
- Premium and exclusive content will drive, simple interface will keep it
- Rights issues are a problem but locked into the studio system
- Try to “grow the category”, majority on consumers still using linear, scheduled TV
- Try to address local rights ownership. This is the bit where they dug at US based providers and people using them.
- Working on a Sports offering
- and then she showed a Lightbox ad 🙁
- Question costs of other ISPs of getting good lightbox due to charges from Spark-Wholesale for bandwidth exchanged. Not really answered
Quickflix – another view of content delivery in New Zealand – Paddy Buckley, MD of Quickflix NZ
- 1st service to launch in March 2012
- Subscription service for movies and TV shows and Standalone pay-per-view service for new-release movies and some TV shows
- Across lots of devices, Smart TVs, phones, computers, games consoles, tablets, tivo, chromecast. No Linux Client 🙁
- Just 15% of views via the website now
- Content: New release movies, subscriptions content movies, TV shows
- Uses Akamai for delivery. Hosting Centers in Sydney and Perth. AWS/Azure
- Unwritten 5 second rule. Content should play within 5 seconds of pressing play
- The future
- Multiple Models, Not just SVOD, eg TVOD, AVOD, EVOD, EST
- More fibre, fast home wifi and better hardware
- VOD content getting nearer to the viewer. HbbTV combines broadcast and on-demand being done by freeview
- Android TV
- Viewing levels to increase (volume and frequency), people will pick and mix between providers
- Aiming at 50% of households, 1 million is quite a lots for any scale.
- Coming soon
- 1080p/4K , 5.1 surround sound
- Fewer device limits. All services and all devices
- More streams
- Changing release windows
- Live streaming
- PPV options to compliment
- Download now, view later
- What we need from ISPs
- Significant bandwidth
- Mooorrreee bandwidth
- People will change ISPs if the ISP can’t provide the level of service
- Netflix is naming and shaming. Netflix best/worst list
- Prediction that NZ could hit 50% SVOD within a couple of years
- Asked if they will be going broke in next few months. Says he’s done deal with Presto in Aus and will ease funding problems but business as normal in the NZ
- SVOD has evolved from back-catalog TV shows a few years ago to first-run now. Will probably keep going forward with individual shows being provider-exclusive for now, especially since services are fairly low cost per month
- A few questions about subtitles. Usually available (although can cost extra) but not good support with end devices to turn on/off .
