PlayTheTV

I ran yesterday into a very interesting post written by a friend, Antonio Pavolini, one of the main media landscape analysts in Italy. His post, published on Voices, the new collective blog launched by Telecomitalia quotes the IPTV italian association report, stating that by 2014 the majority of tv sets in Italy will be internet enabled. The point of he post is quite simple: CE manufacturers add the ethernet port to tv sets as a marketing strategy, they don’t really have interest in launching OTT tv, they prefer to keep up with a strong relationship with broadcasters and close access to new players. All in all, in this country there’s no actual ondemand services like Netflix or Vudu, we still deal with OTT closed services based on MHP, and anything you can possibly find for free using your (usually crappy) internet connection is way far from being catchy. Anyone who lives in Italy can easily understand how Antonio is right, checking out the typical CE shopping scheme: regardless social status, people buys a new TV because it’s “cool”, “thin” and “cheap”, not because it offers new services otherwise not available. Now, how this walled garden can be smashed?

“The problem is not the technology. The players (majors, broadcasters, independent content creators, CE manufacturers, etc) should understand that a new and smooth media ecosystem capable to monetize the entire content supply chain, can happily and profitably marry with the user right to platform-neutral access to those contents”

Antonio is damn right on this, especially because, as we all know, things on the internet go fast, and if access to content is closed or reduced, chances are that smart people usually finds holes to that content.
Italy is at the 10th place in worldwide online piracy, right after countries not exactly known for being smooth and open in content distribution and access (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia…), and first of the western countries, as shown in this infographic by go-globe.com, via affreschi digitali, excerpted here:

The italian 20something are happy to receive in their house a “cool” and “thin” new tv set, just to connect appliances the already own (game consoles, multimedia disks, media centers, and use it as a big screen to watch movies and tv shows downloaded via p2p networks or file servers like megaupload or filesonic. The content demand is high, and it’s definitely not fulfilled by traditional supply chain. Why would I buy expensive dtt decoders when I can use appliances I already have?The killer hardware is not the ethernet port, it’s the hdmi port. That said, a revision of media distribution strategy by big players is simply what is needed to monetize and existing demand. The marriage is easy, because if you give people an easy and cheap way to access content, they pay.

Final question: will it happen with TV what happened with mobile, where walled garden tumbled down thanks the pressure of outside quality content, or the higher interests and the language/localization problems will drive to a different end?