TORONTO – Peeking through the network clouds, Comcast CTO and executive vice-president Tony Werner has seen the future and it is digital rights management.
In a keynote address at the SCTE Canadian Summit Tuesday morning, Werner predicted that “physical media will disappear” by 2020 as “digital assets move to the cloud.” As a result, he said, consumers will largely acquire the rights to use digital media content in certain ways, instead of buying huge computer hard drives, Blu-ray players, and other devices, or building collections of DVDs, CDs, tapes, books, newspapers, and other physical assets.
“Life is not about having big hard drives and caches at homes,” he proclaimed, arguing that “persistent high-capacity broadband” is changing everything about media use. “Rather than owning assets, we’ll own digital management rights.” Items like set top boxes and Blu-ray players juts won’t be made anymore in 10 years.
Werner said the digital rights management goals of such industry groups as Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which is backed by Comcast, represent "the cave writings of where this ultimately will go.” He continued, “these rights will need to 100% replicate what we do with physical assets."
Describing himself as “a big fan of tablets right now” despite some initial doubts about their durability, Werner argued that the iPad and its offspring are filling “a very unique gap in the video experience” by providing “a great way to navigate,” view, and even buy video content. With scores of millions of iPads already sold after the device’s first nine months on the market, he noted that it’s “probably the fastest adopted consumer device” in history, easily outperforming even the vaunted iPhone.
Not surprisingly, then, Comcast will continue embracing the iPad and other connected tablet devices. Similarly, the MSO will also keep shifting toward cloud-based architectures for video navigation and delivery.
Werner (pictured) said iPads are already providing Comcast with much greater product development efficiencies than traditional digital cable set-top boxes ever could. While the MSO has about 300 software developers working on product development and quality assurance for its legacy digital set-tops, it has just 10 software developers performing the same duties for its new iPad applications.
Plus, the much smaller iPad group can churn out product updates much quicker. While Comcast can produce a new set-top guide about every 18 months and have it reach 60% of its footprint, it completed its first iPad app in a mere five months time. Relying on a flexible, web services platform, the MSO is now crafting the fourth version of its iPad app (part of its Xfinity branding), less than a year after the device first came out.
“The cycles are getting shorter and shorter for development,” Werner said. "It’s the only way we can keep up with the [product] cycles that are important to us as we go forward." He noted that Comcast has developed the "CPlatform," which enables the MSO’s backend systems to behave like web services.
Besides digital rights management and “cloud-based or Web-based development,” Werner named 10 other “up trends” that he believes will shape the remainder of the decade for media. He cited the “social/entertainment Web,” random access channel guides, just-in-time service bundling, and tablet-based consumption of entertainment as rising trends, among others.
On the downward-sloping side, Werner identified the information web, traditional channel grid guides, “bound services,” and PC consumption of entertainment. He also sees today’s MPEG-2 video content giving way to “fragmented MPEG-4” video streams and voice communications losing ground to short text messages and tweets.
In addition to predicting the future, Werner reflected on the past. Recalling the 13 years that he worked for Rogers Communications in both Canada and the U.S. earlier in his career, he opened his talk by paying tribute to Canada, Toronto, and his old company. “I learned more at Rogers than anywhere else in my life,” he said.
Werner also paid tribute to the man who hired him, the late Ted Rogers, telling stories about Rogers’ abilities to raise money, rally his employees, and prepare for grueling regulatory hearings. “Ted Rogers was a very vivid man in my past,” he said. “I have more flash-bulb memories of Ted Rogers than anybody in the history of time.”
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network.
