Attorney Gregg Skall of Womble Carlyle and Don Hicks of the Missouri Broadcasters Association have been reporting this week from Las Vegas, where they are attending Telecom 05 in Las Vegas, a major trade show for the telecommunications industry.

"We will change the way people watch TV," is the way Edward E. Whitacre, Jr., Chairman & CEO, SBC Corp. (soon to be AT&T again after it closes on that acquisition) keynoted TELECOM 05 on its third day. Soon after, Hearst-Argyle honcho David J. Barrett added his voice on behalf of television, with a "let us help you do that," as reported in TVBR yesterday (10/26/05 TVBR #210). He also noted that Hearst has been experimenting with new forms of delivery, such as weather-plus internet programming and delivery through consumer cell phones and wireless networks.

---

Thus continued the march toward an IP delivered personalized television world of the future at this confab of telco technology. In follow up by LeAnn Champion of SBC's Project Lightspeed, she said integration is the next big thing; the ability to integrate video, voice, broadband and wireless. It's not about the race to integrate the home. It goes beyond the home to a digital lifestyle that that includes, for example, finding the program you want by a search on your mobile phone and then remotely setting your DVR to watch it at your leisure.

In a cable industry response, Cox Communications CEO Jim Robbins, after telling the audience he was retiring in 2 months, said of telco competition, "bring it on," noting that Cox had signed one million triple play customers. His only proviso, play fair... don't use regulation to telco's advantage.

Robert B. Clasen, President & CEO, Starz Entertainment reminded broadcasters and telcos alike that, as phone enters the video delivery business, it is critical to not just imitate TV and radio, but create something entirely new. In the world of IPTV, he said, time slots and 1/2 hour and hour lengths have no meaning. Let the creative people loose. He added, the key to IPTV is that it can be portable.

In the session, It Looks and Smells Like Broadcasting, but it's Actually Telecom - Qualcomm's Glynn Spangenberg drove that point home by introducing Qualcomm's new MediaFlo USA. If you've been wondering what Qualcomm is going to do with the 700 MHz channels it bought, here is the answer. Its vision - - a nation of 6 MHz channels delivering 30 channels from the get-go, located on broadcast towers. It plans an October 2006 nationwide rollout in 7 geographic zones with a subscription model providing all the standard channels in basic with tiers of sports, news and even ... soccer mom. Its sales team: the wireless carriers. Shelly Palmer, Palmer Media and Chair, Advanced Media Committee for the Emmy Awards, added that, while online access may be "the great divide" the key is cell phones. Cell phones are the great equalizer, "they all have cell phones." Kids wear their music like a fashion accessory and there're dying to wear their videos the same way.

In Real World IPTV Services - Putting the User at the Center of Their Entertainment Experience, Ken Twist, of consulting firm Ovum-RHK, predicted that 24 Million households will be accessing IPTV services by the end of 2009 to the tune of 3.5 B in revenues. In this world, the killer application about TV IS TV, said Tim Fritzley, VP, Sales and Solutions, Microsoft TV. So, he told telcos, form a partnership with content owners and local market television, remember that IPTV has to be better TV, "me too TV will not win!" By early 2006, Microsoft will have a robust ecosystem in place to support Telcos for an equally robust IPTV system in which the defining feature will be user personal control. Alcatel's Tim Krause noted that IPTV changes every day, unlike the telephone business. It requires new packaging and new programming personalized for everyone. It's a continuum from movies on demand to Amigo TV, to time shifted, to Network based DVR, to Personal TV, and the more personal it gets, it creates a very high rate of concurrency. That means that you can't statistically share bandwidth. IPTV will require a minimum of 20 Mbps bandwidth per subscriber.

Skall/Hicks Observation:
As we have been observing, the world of IPTV presents some very interesting and very important opportunity challenges for local broadcasters: A new programming model that appeals to the "what I want, when I want it" generation; an opportunity to produce local programming and reuse older programming with a "longtail." It offers the opportunity of partnerships with telcos to carry the primary digital channel, the multicast channels and additional channels of programs, and, possibly, a digital bit stream of many more channels over-the-air. New question: Has Qualcomm beat broadcasting to its own new game? Using the freed-up 700 MHz spectrum and broadcast from TV towers across the country, will Qualcomm preempt TVs ability to leverage digital as new forms of compression make ever more simultaneous programming streams available to broadcasting? The key could be that Qualcomm plans a national program list, nothing in this presentation revealed plans for anything localized.