Communications Crossroads - Fall 2007 - (Page 14)

COVER STORY The word among the international programming providers is that the big cable companies—those guys who can be so hard to compete against—generally offer limited international and foreign-language programming. They may offer only a few hours a day, or only a handful of programs. With the efﬁciencies built into the satellite and IPTV delivery model (the telecom pulls from the Language Spoken at Home satellite and delivers via Population 5 years and over 268,110,961 IPTV), small Speak only English 80.60% carriers can Speak a language other than English 19.40% provide much more content, Speak a language other than English 51,934,850 many more Spanish or Spanish Creole 62.00% hours a day. Other Indo-European languages 19.10% Asian and Pacific Island languages 15.00% Time Shifting Other languages 4.00% Sam Attisha, who is an executive with Table 1: Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005 American Community Survey Irdeto, a leader in content The same study also offers a look security, says time shifting is a service at how non-English speakers are the telecoms can provide that is truly distributed around the country. valued by the viewer. “Time shifting is While there is the expected higher really big in the ethnic space,” he says. Lanka. “Will they equal the Latino market? No, but they’re still very signiﬁcant,” Ozkan asserts. Ken Pyle, President of Viodi, LLC, a company that helps independent telecoms with their content, agreed that the international audience in the U.S. is becoming more varied. He is located in Silicon Valley, “where 26% of the population was born in another country.” Many are highly educated consumers from India and China. He has seen other populations in areas that might be surprising to some. For example, St. James, Minnesota, is about 26% Latino; and the Twin Cities has a large Hmong population. Many Vietnamese have settled in Texas and Louisiana. He encourages telecoms to research their local areas and determine whether they have an underserved community that would make a good television market. “If you have a community of 100 or so in a language, it’s probably worth doing. If you have 10, maybe not.” A 2005 study by the Census Bureau estimated that almost 52 million people living in the U.S. speak a language other than English in the home. Here’s the breakdown by language. (See Table 1) percentages in the Southwestern states, the fact remains that threequarters of all states report having at least 7% of households speaking a language other than English in the home. Obviously, there’s an audience for programming in foreign languages, and with international content. How can that audience be served? What’s Available A variety of companies are out there, around the world, developing content for practically any nationality, language, or interest you can think of. Innovative packagers are intent on making it easy and proﬁtable for telecoms to deliver that content to the communities that want it. Traditional, Real-Time TV “At 9 a.m. in California, it’s 10 hours later in Turkey, so going with the live broadcast feeds would give the content at times that don’t really suit the consumer.” At that time, when the California resident has headed out to work, or started cleaning up the children’s breakfast mess and looking to settle the little ones down in front of an ageappropriate program analogous to Sesame Street or Teletubbies, the Turkish broadcast would just be wrapping up the evening news, or possibly offering an early evening drama for adults. To deal with that, and offer television shows at times that ﬁt the viewers’ schedules—at times that feel natural—telecoms can use time shifting. With this, the California carrier receives the content delivery from Turkey in real time, and then stores it to show at a more appropriate local time. Push PVR Push PVR (Personal Video Recorder) is another technology that allows the provider to offer programming at times that suit the computer. Attisha says this typically needs a two-way network, and can’t be done with satellite. Basically, providers push content to the hard drive of the PVR box at night. The next morning, the subscriber looks to see what has been downloaded over night, and purchases what he’s interested in. Irdeto provides the encryption/ decryption for this process. Video Games Video games from the home country, in the mother tongue, are predictably quite popular with immigrants. Many of the programming suppliers also offer these. Keith Wymbs, Senior Product Manager of Motorola’s set top box product line, says “our IPTV set top box now has an open software stack that we put on top of the set top box.” He explains that the 14 COMMUNICATIONS CROSSROADS www.ustelecom.org http://www.ustelecom.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Communications Crossroads - Fall 2007

Up Front Contents TeleBites Cover Story: The World at Your Doorstep Business Advantages: Reaching Out to the Fast-Growing Hispanic Market Technology Today: Ideas from Foreign Telecoms You Should Consider Industry Calendar Index to Advertisers People Straight Talk

Communications Crossroads - Fall 2007

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